


The End of Cycles

by ac_123



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Community: hannibalkink, M/M, Manipulative!Hannibal, Sexual Content, Torture, Violence, healthy!Will, rape threat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:22:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ac_123/pseuds/ac_123
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal Lecter is an Omega on the verge of menopause.  Will Graham is an Alpha with the most obvious crush in the world.  Throw in a few dead bodies, some urine, and Hannibal fucking around with everyone and you get the most dangerous courtship in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the hannibalkink prompt: _I've seen a prompt for Will leaving suppressants behind because he hadn't had a heat in so long. If there is one thing I love, it's flipping a script._
> 
> _For years, Omega!Hannibal has been on suppressants for various reasons. He didn't need idiots - including his own patients- flirting with him. He rather disliked dealing with messy heats or the constant feeling of arousal messing with his head while working/hunting. However, for actual health reasons or even Bedelia Du Maurier's urging, Hannibal decides to leave his suppressants temporarily._
> 
> _And being who he is, Hannibal decides to (tease/mate/mind-fuck/all of the above) Alpha!Will._
> 
> _Bonus:  
>  \- Everyone but Bedelia is shocked that Hannibal is an omega, not an alpha or beta.  
> \- Will's dreams take an odd turn when a giant wolf brings macabre courtship 'gifts' to the stag.  
> \- Jealous!Will starts finding sneaky ways to leave his scent on Hannibal when various alphas try flirting with the doctor.  
> \- Creepy!Stalker!Will hanging outside Hannibal's house at night (much to said cannibal's amusement).  
> \- Omega!Hannibal continuously using his scent to mess with Will's head, flashing his throat, dropping his eyes submissively on the rare occasions they catch Will's. _
> 
> _Basically, let Omega!Hannibal have fun with his Will Graham._
> 
> All the chapters here have been edited and can be considered the "final copies". The sex doesn't really happen until the very last chapter, but I think it's a rather fun journey all the way through.

He likes this particular doctor because of her candor, manners, and earthy smell. She walks into a room and brings with her the musky incense of comfortably settled and happily married. When she smiles, it is with confidence and crows feet. They get along and she doesn't sneer at his slim hips, ringless finger, and individual scent.

"How have your heats been?" she asks, opening to a new page in her notebook, adjusting her glasses. "You said they were petering off last time."

"They were," he says. "I looked through my calendar and I saw that I haven't had one in three months."

She looks over the rims of her glasses, gray eyebrows raising slightly. "Really?" She opens the small folder on her desk. "You are...47?"

"That is correct."

"Have you increased your sexual activity at all?"

He shakes his head. The last person he slept with has been dead for over a decade. He remembers the springy feel of his thinly sliced thigh. Delicious when crusted with toasted mustard seeds and left to broil in his own juices.

"Have you had any migraines or hot flashes or strange cravings recently?"

He leans back and thinks. "A few strange cravings," he says, "mostly for salt and fish. No migraines but I have been more sensitive to electric lights."

"What about night sweats?" she asks. "Or pain during urination or vaginal intercourse or masturbation?"

He doesn't remember the last time he masturbated. He thinks about his vibrator, the sole survival of his treasure trove of sex toys. He last saw it when he fished the batteries out of it for his radio. That was months ago, nearly an entire year. He's never been one for fingering himself outside of his heats, and his slim and unresponsive penis is the last thing on his mind when he wants to get off.

"I haven't had any night sweats or pain, but there has been a significant decrease in sexual appetite."

She makes notes as he speaks, nodding along. When he finishes, she places her pen down on the desk, hand flat on it with the stiffness of finality. "It is too early to congratulate you, but I do believe you are entering a new phase in your biological life."

"Menopause?"

"Perhaps," she says. "Or perimenopause, which is first stage of menopause. But you are the right age for it. Your heats were already lessening in strength, duration, and frequency.” She shrugs. “It's not improbable."

"Is there any way to find out?"

"I could take some blood and get it tested. A blood test would take a week at most," she says. "Otherwise you'd have to wait another eight months to know for sure."

He nods, considering. "If I am menopausal or postmenopausal, what should I be expecting?"

"Well," she says, fingers laced together and resting on her tummy, "Omegas who enter menopause normally experience the previously mentioned symptoms. You know, hot flashes, night sweats, that's fairly common knowledge. Sexual desires do change, but it's split pretty evenly between increases and decreases. If you do get aroused, you might find that you lubricate less and your lubrication may dry out sooner. Increasing the Omega-3 in your diet or a good lubricant would fix that with little side effects. There might be some weight gain.” She stares out the window and fiddles with her modest wedding band. “Postmenopausal Omegas do have a higher occurrence of ovarian, uterine, and breast cancers. Since you have never been pregnant or given birth, you would be at a very high risk.”

He crosses his legs. “Why is that?”

“Several reasons,” she says. “There have been a few studies that suggest the hormones that activate lactation also fortify the breast tissue. Other studies focusing on the uterus and ovaries draw heavily from the breast studies, but, excluding their sound statistics that do show a correlation between pregnancy and reduced cancer rates, they are largely inconclusive. Higher levels of estrogen are known to put Omegas at higher risk for uterine cancer. Some postmenopausal Omegas take estrogen therapy to lessen the impact and severity of their symptoms, which puts them at higher risk.”

He nods. “Would my hormone therapy continue to work after menopause?”

She nods. “Of course. You would be prescribed a smaller dose, but combined with your topical regimen you would be able to continue passing as a Beta.”

“Would continued use increase the possibilities of cancer?” he asks, eyes shifting momentarily to the gray parking lot outside of the window. There is a sun-powered dancing flower swaying and smiling on the window sill. A crayon drawing of two humanoid figures holding sausage arms is taped underneath the flower. In the corner, in blue, is an epigraph: ‘Monroe and Mommy.’

“Cancer is so dependent on so many factors,” she says softly. “It might, but you are a healthy and fit Omega, so does that mean you will get cancer?” She shrugs, offers empty hands. “Do you know your family’s medical history?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s entirely your decision,” she says. “I would recommend going off your pills, if only for financial reasons.”

“I am not in a difficult financial situation,” he says softly.

“I know,” she says, a kind and sad smirk tugging on the left side of her mouth, “but a wholly topical regimen would be a cheaper and equally effective alternative.”

He breathes deeply, lets it out slowly. “I would like to volunteer for a blood test. When those results return, I will make my decision.”

She nods. “Very reasonable,” she says. She opens his file again. “Before we take your blood, how are you on your medication?”

“I have enough for the rest of the month,” he says.

“Brilliant,” she says. She lets the file fall close. “Let’s go get some blood.”

~~~

“I went to the gynecologist the other day,” he says when he’s with Bedelia. Her cold blue eyes are settled on him. Unblinking. Untrusting. Her hands are clasped and tucked primly between her left thigh and the side of her chair. His legs are crossed and he is leaning back in his chair. “She suspects that I am experiencing menopause.”

“Do you suspect that as well?” she asks.

“I do,” he says. He sighs and runs his hands down his waistcoat. “She collected a sample of my blood to be tested. To be certain.”

“What do you expect this test to tell you?”

He sighs. His eyes crawl over the poplars that camouflage Bedelia’s house from the winding country road. _It must be difficult to leave here when it snows_ , he thinks. “I expect it to affirm what I already believe. That I have ripened and fallen from the tree without being picked.”

“Does that bother you?”

Does it? He wiggles his foot as he considers the question. He is successful in all areas except his private life, but that has never upset him. His affairs are not for the faint of heart and he does not wish to involve those who would be unprepared. Those who hover too close endanger him and, by extension, themselves. “I feel a sense of missed opportunity,” he says. “But I do not fear loneliness. I have friends. I have never felt the desire to raise children until I met Abigail, and her tragedy has turned me back to my original feelings.”

“Most people would find that strange,” Bedelia says. He agrees. He has seen a fair share of childless Omegas. Some, like him, were career people who ignored the soft tick of their clocks. Others were infertile and struggling to accept that their bodies were broken. All of them, though, came with heads hanged in defeat. All of them, frightened, scared, and regretful, poured out to him stories of escaped loves, mapped out their guilt in blues and grays.

“I have been called strange before,” he says with a smirk.

Bedelia’s calm, smooth face cracks with a hint of amusement. “You said you feel like you’ve missed an opportunity. What opportunity have you missed?”

He shifts in his seat. “An opportunity for love,” he says. “I have had romances, but nothing nearly like the feeling of a lasting desire to bond. Many patients come to me and discuss that feeling. It seems unpleasant.”

“Commitments can be, sometimes,” she agrees.

“I am morbidly curious to understand an emotion that is meant to bring stability and comfort, and yet more often than not drives a person to irrational behaviors and thoughts,” he confesses.

“Do you think love is morbid?” she asks.

“It can be, sometimes,” he answers.

“I won’t deny that the social conception of love is a trying and confusing thing, Hannibal. In the popular mind, people like us are hopeless. What is important is that we don’t give in to that idea of fated doom. You could still experience love,” she says. “You are a successful and, objectively speaking, attractive man. Someone is bound to find their way into your heart.”

He smirks. “Objectively attractive,” he says, partly to himself, partly to irritate Bedelia. She doesn’t take his bait. She smiles at him, warm and clinical, and checks her watch. She stands and smooths her skirt before offering him wine.

~~~

It has been raining recently. Baltimore reverts slowly into the bog the Iroquois once knew it to be. The Chesapeake reaches out with white, crumbling fingers to take unlucky fishermen while winds have forced another car off of the Bay Bridge. It’s the third in as many years. The man inside survived the fall, but belligerent waves crushed his bones against the piers. He drowned, either on his blood or murky salt water no one knows. Both were in his deflated lungs.

Will Graham comes home with him for dinner after their night session. Hannibal has taken Will’s coat and instructed him to take off his shoes. His floors were just cleaned, he explains, as he slips off his muddy rain boots, and he would appreciate keeping them clean for longer than a week. Will understands. He nods and bends over to untie his laces.

Hannibal takes the wet jackets and hangs them on hangers in his wash room, careful to not let the two clothing items touch. He comes out and finds Will standing at the island, fingers tapping rhythmlessly on the top.

"Are you thirsty?" he asks. Will nods. "Would you prefer beer or wine?"

"Alana tells me that you make an amazing home-brewed beer," Will says. "She demands that I try it."

He smiles as he takes out a couple of glasses. "Alana is far too generous in her compliments," he says. He opens his fridge door and pulls out an unopened beer bottle. "But in this one arena I trust her expert palate." He pours the beer into a tall glass before handing it to Will. He takes an open bottle of Shiraz and pours himself a generous but not indecent amount.

Will smells the beer. "Was this brewed with blueberries?"

"I have friends at a local winery. Every so often they recycle their barrels so one year I took a few." Hannibal puts the cork back in the bottle. "The beer you are drinking was brewed for a year and a half in a barrel used for their sweet summer wine." He picks up his glass and holds it out to Will. "To recovery," he says.

Will smiles, slow and deep, crinkling the corners of his eyes and tightening the skin on his cheeks. He touches the lip of his glass to Hannibal's. "To recovery," he repeats. They sip simultaneously. Hannibal's eyes flutter shut as yeasty pepper gives way to a smooth sluice of dark grapes and wood. His lips spread into a pleased smile as he retreats from the glass. Will looks dazed. He licks absently at the foam on his lips.

"I have," he says, putting his wine glass on the marble countertop, "a shank of venison I have been saving for the right occasion."

Will can't hide his grimace. "I'm not much of a deer guy."

"Another time, then,” Hannibal says. “How do you feel about duck?"

Will raises his glass. “Sounds good,” he says. Hannibal smiles and turns to get the supplies from his fridge. “Is there anything I can do to help you?” Will asks.

“You can help me,” he answers, squatting down to pull kale and thyme out of the vegetable drawer, “by drinking your beer and enjoying your food.” He set his armful of ingredients on the island before closing the door and striding to hanging baskets of fruits. He pulls five clementines from a lower basket.

“Are you sure?” Will asks. Hannibal shoots him a teasing glare. Will smiles again. “If you say so. What are you making, anyway?”

“Duck breast with a clementine sauce and sautèed kale.” He turns on the stove and pulls a pan out of one of the surrounding cabinets. “Simple, but very delicious during this time of year.”

Distant thunder rolls over the house. Hannibal pulls out a few bowls, a cheese grater, olive oil, a sheet pan, and several other items. He is aware of Will’s static, boring eyes, catching the movements of his arms, the curve of his back. He is careful to look away when Hannibal has him in sight, and his arms are held close to his body.

“Jack wants me back soon,” Will says.

Hannibal is laying the thinly sliced pectorals of a male Alpha art dealer who once referred to a male and female Omega couple as a pair of wasted cunts. His entire chest cavity had been something to marvel over. He still has the ribs and is tempted to try his hand at traditional Carolina barbecue once the weather clears up.

“It’s understandable,” he says. “You have a remarkable record.” He looks up tepidly. “But you don’t want to?”

Will shrugs. “I’m not sure how much of what happened six months ago was me and how much was the encephalitis. If I go back, I’ll see what I see but I’ll be putting away some pretty bad people. If I don’t go back, I’ll be able to distance myself but unable to help.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” Hannibal says. He is cutting his clementines, preparing them for juicing. “You would be helping to train a new generation of agents. One of them is sure to overpass even your own preternatural abilities.”

“Maybe...” Will sips from his glass. The fat of the pectorals is slowly being rendered. A smokey sweet scent floats up from the pan, shudders above it. “Do you think I should go back?”

He has moved on to the kale. Fresh and bitter and still wet from midday when he came home to clean it. He bundles the leaves and cuts off their stems. “Are you asking as my patient, or as my friend?”

Will draws out his answer. “Yes.”

Hannibal keeps his head bent and sucks lightly on the inside of his bottom lip. “As your doctor, I think you should take precaution before returning to Jack’s team. Perhaps speak to him, ask for only occasional cases. Then, once you understand your limits, you can start pushing them again, little by little.”

Will swallows. He looks into his glass. “And as my friend?”

Hannibal lets the air in his lungs pass through his nose. He can see them flatten, pink and wet, can see the oxygen slip into his bloodstream and settle in his right atrium. He can see the little nodule of flesh that controls his heart. It sparks twice a second, opening valves, closing them. He looks up, sees Will, whose face is no longer wane and pale, who no longer smells like burnt sugar and cloves. He smells, now, like lost opportunity.

“As your friend,” he says, “I want you to stay away from Jack. From the murders and the fear. I want you to remain healthy, and I think that means reduced exposure to Jack Crawford.”

They move on to a different subject. They move on to several different subjects. They move into the dining room. They eat and drink and laugh while the rain patters against the patio doors. Hannibal sighs into his first taste of soft, red meat and honeyed orange and dark wood. Will watches him closely. He can see color of Will's face darken when he exposes a wrist to check the time. "I have," he says, "a salted caramel ice cream that I have been meaning to eat." He smiles placidly at Will. "Would you like some?"

Will nods. Hannibal takes their plates into the kitchen. He pulls out a couple of ice cream bowls and opens the freezer door when he hears a distant jingling tune. He pauses and listens to it for a few moments before quietly closing the door. He treads lightly, hallway carpet and socks padding soft and quick steps, making him virtually silent as he follows the growing stream of tinny song into his laundry room. He stops in front of Will's jacket, where the ringtone is loudest, and reaches in to see the name on the screen. Jack Crawford. Of course. He puts the phone back and returns to the kitchen where he scoops the ice cream into the bowls. He carries them and a few jars of fruit syrups. He carries them into the dining room.

"That looks delicious," Will compliments when Hannibal returns with the ice cream. "Is it safe to assume that you made it yourself?"

Hannibal smirks. "Is my pattern that obvious?"

“You’re surprising easy to profile,” Will says with a hint of sarcasm. He spoons a large portion of his ice cream into his mouth. He holds his napkin to his lips. “Wow...” he mumbles.

Hannibal raises his chin, amused. He dips the tip of his spoon into the frozen beige cream. Uses the tip of his tongue to test the temperature. Laps at the confection just before the spoon enters his mouth. Though Will doesn’t visibly react, just bows his head to focus on his dessert, he can smell a sharp increase in his arousal.

A phone rings. This one is much louder, much closer. Hannibal excuses himself and rises to fetch his home phone. The ID lists a blocked number and he resigns himself to the loss of his Will. He answers. “Hannibal Lecter speaking.”

“Lecter,” Jack snaps, “do you know where Will is?”

“I do,” Hannibal answers. He leaves a moment of silence that urges Jack to ask, with no small amount of impatience, where, exactly, was Will at that moment?

“He is eating ice cream in my dining room,” Hannibal answers.

“At least he’s somewhere safe,” Jack mutters. “Can you put him on the line? I have something I need to discuss with him.”

“Certainly.” Hannibal returns to the dining room. Will is nearly done with his dessert and doesn’t look the least bit confused as to why Hannibal is delivering the phone to him. He looks disappointed, resigned, as he takes the offered phone. He listens, mostly, and speaks to Jack only with short, clipped words. Hannibal thinks he tries to say “no”, to create a boundary for Jack not to cross, but the attempt is quickly and firmly broken. Hannibal witnesses a solemn silence and a significant look in his direction. Then with a final “okay”, Will turns off the phone and places it face-down on the table.

“I’m sorry,” Will says. He rubs his hands across his eyes. “I’m sorry--I have to leave.”

“A case?”

“Yeah,” Will says, drawing it out. “An important one, according to Jack.”

“The Chesapeake Ripper?”

Will shakes his head. “Jack didn’t say much, but he did tell me that there is a trail of bodies that stretches from Detroit to Richmond. So that’s where I’m off to.”

Hannibal steps towards the door. “Let me get your coat.” Will smiles gratefully, shortly.

Their clothes are dry enough when Hannibal retrieves the threadbare all-weather coat that Will refuses to replace. He takes a moment to smell it. The intoxicating traces of encephalitis and fear cling to the collar. He looks over his shoulder and then quickly rubs the collar along his neck. He sniffs it again. He is there--not overwhelmingly, but enough so that on Will's long trek to Richmond he will be a guiding shade. He returns to Will, now moved to the mud room where he is putting on his rain boots. He helps him into his coat.

“I’m really sorry about having to leave,” Will says.

“Don’t be. It’s nothing you can control.” Hannibal squeezes his shoulder. “I can always have you over another night.”

Will nods. His eyes falter to Hannibal’s lips and then he leaves.

~~~

The phone rings during Hannibal’s lunch hour. He finishes chewing, wipes his mouth, and answers his work phone. “Doctor Lecter.”

“Hi Doctor Lecter, this is Doctor Rubin,” comes the calm, warm voice of the gynecologist. “We have the results of your blood test in the office. Would you like to hear them now or would you prefer to come into the office?”

“I am ready to hear them now,” he says.

“Okay.” She pauses as she shuffles through the folder. “Well...your estrogen and progesterone levels are low, but your omegarone levels are normal. Which, for you, would probably mean they’re pretty low. I do believe you are right smack dab in the middle of menopause.”

He flips his fork between his fingers. He watches it glint in the low light.

“Doctor Lecter?”

“I have been thinking about my regimens,” he says. “I want to cancel all of my prescriptions.”

There’s a charged moment of shocked silence. “Are you sure? Even the ointments?”

“Yes.”

“Well...if this is your decision then I feel it is my duty to inform you that because of this decision you might have a spike in your hormones. This might result in a heat or even pseudo-estrus, where you have the symptoms of a heat but you aren’t actually ovulating so you wouldn’t conceive.” She clicks her tongue. “I’d say that by the end of the month, others will start scenting you as an Omega.” She pauses again. “And, you can always start back on some of your prescriptions if you change your mind.”

He put his fork on his napkin. “I understand.”


	2. Chapter 2

_REPORT: A body was discovered in the trunk of an abandoned car in Richmond, VA at approximately 8:45 PM EST on the 28th of July. The body had been found mutilated and the sex organs had been removed. Cause of death has not been established._

_This recent discovery marks the sixth body mutilated in such a fashion. The first was Adam Schaeffer, a 30-year-old male Beta accountant from Detroit, MI, found with his testicals cut off with a blunt knife-like object and lacerations in and around his anus. In this instance, cause of death was established as asphyxiation caused by a collapsed lung. The other four, Tristan Hodge, 43, of Dayton, OH, Patrick Cannon, 28, of Lexington, KY, Chester Wilman, 33, of Knoxville, TN, and Geoffery Jones, 35, of Roanoake, VA, were all discovered to have been sexually brutalized and mutilated but died of asphyxiation._

_Due to the brutal nature of these crimes and competing jurisdictions the FBI has stepped in and is leading the investigation._

_Infamous profiler Will Graham was spotted on the scene. Graham has been missing from crime scenes since he was admitted to a Washington, D.C. area hospital six months ago. It has been reported that he was admitted for intensive care after he was diagnosed with encephalitis._

~~~

He spends the next few days informing his patients of his biological sex. Most, he was pleased to find, were indifferent, even happy, about the truth. Only two walked out on him, and one was reasonable enough to ask for a referral at the end of their session, citing a deeply disturbing sense of having been deceived and misled as the reason for her leaving.

"I mean," she said, "if you can't trust your therapist , who can you trust?"

When Will turns up unannounced for a conversation, he remains the last patient to the informed. Hannibal had considered telling him, but also wondered how long he could keep the ruse. He decided, as he was flushing his hormone pills down the toilet, that it would be more interesting that way.

"What would you like to talk about?" Hannibal asks as he closes his office door. Will is slowly walking through the office, rolling up his shirt sleeves, distractedly looking around. "Will?" The younger man turns around abruptly. "Is there something the matter?"

Will breathes out. "The case Jack has me on."

Hannibal nods. He ambles slowly toward his desk. "Do you think you returned too soon?"

Will sits down in Hannibal's chair. He picks at the stitching in the leather. “I don’t... It’s not that.” He rubs his chin. “I...” He presses his thumb and middle fingers into his eyes. He hums, and then suddenly stands. “Six Beta men over the past year have been found sexually brutalized, mutilated post-mortem with pregnant Omega urine in their noses, mouths, and lungs. Each of these men were reported missing three to five days before they were found.” He pauses as he begins to pace. Hannibal considers saying something, but Will begins speaking again.

“I don’t understand,” Will says. “All of the wounds were post-mortem, even the rope burns on the hands and ankles. They were well fed and washed. The victims were kept intact and were cared for for three or five days before they were found, dead of asphyxiation. The...the mutilation wounds are messy, emotional--angry. Everything about the deaths are emotional, unplanned. The murderer didn’t mean to kill these men, it just happened. So why humiliate them by peeing on them?”

Hannibal touches the edges of his desk. He turns the corner of his jaw up to Will. “You think that a pregnant Omega is doing this?”

Will comes to a halt. “There’s little else we can think,” he acquiesces. “There’s no DNA, blood, or fingerprints. The car belongs to the man we found inside of it. The only clue we have is the urine.”

Hannibal looks at Will and holds his gaze. There’s something else, something that’s making Will’s eyes brighten and focus on him. He adjusts his line of motion; pushes his shoulders back, placing one foot slightly in front of the other, resting his hands on his hips. “You’re unsure of motive.”

Will looks away. He begins pacing again. “You’re humiliating someone while you’re taking care of them.”

“Perhaps this is related to the Omega’s impending motherhood,” he suggests. He watches Will move between, around, and between the chairs again and again. “New and expectant parents often act irrationally. They react like they are afraid of their child. Or, afraid for their child. Afraid that the demons of their past will influence their child.”

Will shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

Hannibal let’s the statement steep before responding. “Neither would I.” He glances at Will’s shoes, now still, before bringing his eyes to Will’s face.

“Can a Beta get an Omega pregnant?”

Hannibal lifts his eyebrows. “It is possible for a male Beta to impregnate a female Omega.”

“What if,” Will says slowly, “it isn’t about the motherhood, but the pregnancy itself?” His eyes slide over to the far, red wall. Hannibal wonders what he sees. “What if there is a female Omega who is desperately in love with a male Beta? But he--he doesn’t love her. He humiliates her. He leaves her pregnant and feeling unwanted.”

“She wants revenge,” Hannibal leads.

Will shakes his head. “No...no, if she wanted revenge she would have gotten it by now. She’s traveled through at least four states and not left a single clue. She is intelligent, but scared. She still loves him, but she can’t have him. She wants to replace him or, or make him jealous.”

“She’s finding better Betas. Better fathers for her child.”

Will points at Hannibal, nods at nothing. “She’s young. He’s older. He’s established.”

“An affair?”

“Possibly.” Will turns on his heel, puts his hands in his pockets. “Someone with power over her. Someone charming and manipulative. Maybe he was her boss or her professor or...” He stops, looks at Hannibal, swallows. “He raped her. She trusted him during her heat and he took advantage of her. Now, she wants to replace him.”

“She finds male Betas who are like him,” Hannibal says. “She tries to prove to them that she can be nurturing and caring so that they will want to become a surrogate father. When they disappoint her, she becomes angry. She wants to humiliate them the same way she was humiliated.”

“She rapes them,” Will says almost breathlessly.

~~~

His first heat was when he was eleven years old. It started two days after he had gotten into a fight with two older boys just beyond campus walls of his orphanage. That first heat was so intense and so sudden he hadn’t been able to stand or breath deeply. The joints of his knees had the durability of water balloons and felt like static. He wouldn’t fall asleep, but pass out from exhaustion. He felt swollen and watery, like the bloated corpse of a drowned man. If he had been able to move, he might’ve felt seasick just from shaking his head. That first time, he spent four days with his wrists tied to an old brass bed post in the infirmary, writhing and keening as he pleaded to the stern, shriveled nun to let his hands go. To let him touch himself. To touch him. To let someone, anyone, anything, relieve his emptiness.

She would hit a switch on the cross bar of the bed frame, a foot above his head. “Do you want to get pregnant, boy?” she would demand.

He would vomit on her shoes and cry.

The only saving grace of the experience was the timing. Old wives’ tales warned that the rage of an Omega in heat is only matched by the rage of the Devil himself. When the titterings of his feeble-minded fellows reached the hairy, gray ears of their guardian nuns a full change of sheets into his cycle, they waved veiny, liver-spotted hands and instructed him to ask for God’s forgiveness with a full rotation of the rosary. They had not seen the precision with which he had broken the thirteen year old’s arm, exposing marbled scarlet and ivory bone to the winter air, or the care with which he had chosen the branch, flexible and thin, that he proceeded to use on the right eye of the fourteen year old.

Old wives’ tales had comprised the majority of his first understandings of heat. In early pubescence, he had become consumed with collating and understanding their variations, searching for the key to controlling his wild body. Silver mushrooms brewed on the first night of the full moon didn’t soften the transition into and out of cycles. The boiled testicles of a rabbit, a bird, nor fox didn’t stop his ovaries from clenching so tightly he could feel it in his teeth. Wearing a vial of his own lubrication didn’t make his heats consistent and prompt. By the time his uncle elegantly plucked him out of the crumbling beige walls like the wiry, starved weed he had grown into, he was as paralyzed from frustration during his heats as he was arousal and pain.

He still has a few of his old volumes. They are falling apart from their age and poor binding. They are hard to read as well, his childhood handwriting had been appalling, and perhaps the only reason they are remotely legible to him is because he had read and reread them with all of the desperation of his hopeless childhood.

He gently pulls one out from his library. Something in his conversation with Will has reminded him of one of the old fables. Several of them, the ones he had too much dignity to test, involved urine. _A rag soaked with Alpha urine and placed on the forehead at the first signs of cycle will lessen the need of the ailing, unbound Omega._. He turns the pages with the very tips of his fingers, noting the ease with which they ripped. _Drinking a cup of male rabbit urine will increase the speed with which your eggs will grow._ He runs his finger down the page. The paper is rough and dusty, browned by age.

His finger stops at the eighth item on the page. He smirks. He gently closes the book and places it back on the shelf.

~~~

_UPDATE: The identity and cause of death of the Beta man found in the trunk of his own car in Richmond, VA have been confirmed. Thomas Maxwell, 35, was killed via asphyxiation. Sources confirm that his esophagus had been completely crushed. Sources also confirm that his mutilations were all caused post-mortem. He was reported missing by his supervisors at the law firm he worked in three days prior to his gruesome discovery._

_When questioned whether this sixth body in twelve months meant that there was a serial killer moving east from Michigan, the FBI declined to comment._

~~~

Jack is understandably frustrated when he stops by the house for his own unplanned conversation. Freddie Lounds has more leads in the FBI than he has in the current case. Hannibal invites him in, pours two fingers of whiskey and a small glass of port, and joins him in the sitting room.

"I worry about him," Jack offers unbidden.

Hannibal settles in his chair with a soft exhale, barely audible. "As do I."

"I wonder if his head is in the right place for this."

He tips his wine around his glass. "If he is ready?"

Jack shakes his head. He drinks some whiskey. "No. He's ready. It's like there's something else on his mind. Or maybe up his nose."

Hannibal sighs and makes a dramatic gesture with his hand. "I cannot tell you anything, Jack. It would violate the trust of my patient. And my friend."

They are silent for a few moments, sipping, listening to the crickets and the frogs, soaking in the heaviness of still, damp air.

"Bella told me," Jack says, finally.

Hannibal doesn't respond.

"That doesn't violate patient-doctor confidentiality, does it?" Jack asks. "If she told me?"

"It doesn't," Hannibal concedes. He shifts in his chair, suddenly uncomfortable. "Is that why you came here tonight?"

"Something along those lines." Jack looks at him directly.

Hannibal places his drink on the table. "You seem to be connecting me to Will's lack of presence."

"I don't mean to offend, Doctor--"

"And yet you have."

Jack clenches his jaw, stymied. He looks away as he considers his next words. Hannibal sips his port, but it is bitter in his mouth. Perhaps he should check the bottle.

"I am not accusing you of indecent behavior, Doctor Lecter. My concern is completely focused on Will." Jack rolls his thoughts through his mouth. "You have been one of his most stable influences in the past year. I think when he’s looking at the victims, he's seeing you. It scares him.”

He lifts his chin consideringly. Gazes at the radio that sits across the room. It sits under a window through which he can see the embers of the fireflies floating aimlessly and unhurriedly higher. They finally have a dry night to fly.

“He need not be afraid for me.” It comes out a little lower than intended, a little softer. He swallows. No matter.

“I think he’s going to be afraid no matter what.” There’s a fond smirk curling around his words as he says, “It’s his nature to protect.”

Hannibal, himself, smirks. “I do not want to deny him his nature.”

~~~

He and Will both understand that the key to this case is the pregnant Omega urine. But while Will is assuming that the urine is fresh, being produced by the murderer, Hannibal understands its implications.

Which, if he considers it, is unfair. Hannibal plays with a spiked deck. Will is scrambling for aces. If he were to consider the unfairness of his withheld information, he would have to concede that his entire relationship with Will was unfairly tipped in his balance. He will admit that he prefers it that way. When Will does pull his best cards, it makes the game that much more enticing.

The next key is how the murderer is collecting the urine. His guess regarding that is closely linked to his guess of how he is moving so easily across states. He nearly has it when his session with Will begins.

“Good evening,” he greets his patiently quiet Will. “Please, come in.” 

Will enters the office and looks around, sniffing. He is pushing his sleeves up to his elbows and stepping slowly.

“Is something the matter?” he asks.

Will shakes his head. “No--no, it’s nothing.” A beat passes. “Was your last patient an Omega?”

Hannibal isn’t sure if it’s his presence sharpening Will’s already edgy senses, or if the lack of suppressing medication and perfumed lotions are making his odor stronger. Nevertheless, he is pleased. He has not yet been identified by strangers.

“Is that what you’re smelling?” Hannibal asks. Will nods as he sits in the patient’s chair. “My last patient was nearly two hours ago and was a Beta. I believe the Omega you smell is me.”

Will’s head raises slowly, brow deeply creased with his confusing. “What?” he asks in a breath. “Since when?”

“Since I was born.” Will rubs his eyes at the stupidity of his question and the deserved sarcasm of Hannibal’s answer. “However, I have only known since I was eleven--”

“Okay, I get it.” Will removes his hand from his face. He blinks rapidly at the floor.

Hannibal stands behind his chair. “Does this bother you?”

Will looks up at him, looking unsure. “What? That you’re--.” Will shakes his head. “No, no, not at all. You’re still Hannibal right? I just feel really stupid.”

“Please don’t,” he insists. He rounds the chair to sit in it. “I masked my scent very well. Every other Alpha I have encountered misidentified me as a Beta. As did the Betas and Omegas. I did not expect you to be different.” He crosses his legs. “I was more concerned that you would be upset with the lying.”

“Lying?”

He nods. “A few of my patients informed me that they felt they had been lied to because I did not voluntarily offer my sex at the beginning of our relationship.”

Will shakes his head. “No. No. You’ve lied to me about worse things and I’m still here.”

“Your continued presence does not mean you are unhurt,” he says. “You were hurt when you found out the truth about Abigail.”

Will deflates in the chair. His hands clench and release at the edges of the armrests. “You two had your reasons then,” he says. His voice drags with gravel and shame. “What were your reasons now?”

“I had to use medication to regulate my heats,” he says. “When I entered medicine, I found that having a more nurturing scent was limiting to my career opportunities.” A fellow resident at Johns Hopkins had told Hannibal that he was tough for an Omega. In return, Hannibal cut open his throat and quartered his body. Ground part of him into sausage and froze the rest to be used as quick meals throughout the next few weeks.

“You’re going off your suppressants?” 

He nods. 

“Why?”

He cups his own knee and gazes at something far away and not necessarily present. “I am at the stage of my life where I have no more use for them.”

"You're purposely being obtuse." 

His lips thoughtlessly tug into a slight smile.

"I'm sorry."

He looks at Will and sees sympathy and relief. Kind eyes softened but mouth not turned down; rather, kept straight and lineless. There are placid fingers on chair arms, calm feet on carpet.

"How is the search for your Omega coming?"

Will moves like a sigh as he falls apart in his chair. “We have a profile, but nowhere to start. She’s moving alone. We don’t know how she’s finding her victims. She may not be in one place long enough to earn a paycheck.” He rubs the heel of his hand against his cheek. “She could travel for work, but that just makes it harder, doesn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Well, depending on your job your permanent address can be in Texas, your office is in New York, and you’re in neither location for six months of the year. The only people who know where you are are your family, friends, and employers.” He taps his fingers against the chair arm. “There are hundred of companies and thousands of jobs that require extensive travel...”

“And one of those employees is your murderer,” he says.

“A frightened and angry victim who just wants the best for her child,” Will says, vision glazing. He crosses his legs and scratches at the arm chair. “Jack wanted to use you as bait.”

He raises his chin slightly and holds his breath.

“He thinks that she is using dating websites or Craigslist personals to find her victims and that if we found someone who fit the profile we could draw her out.” Will continues. “He didn’t mention you specifically, but you fit the profile and we don’t know anyone else who would be remotely willing.”

“What did you think?”

“It’s an awful idea,” he says. “I don’t want to risk anyone’s life, let alone a friend's."

He exhales. "You fought for my honor," he says.

"Yeah," Will says absently, scratching his chin. "It doesn't mean anything now, though. You don't fit the profile."

He smiles wanly.

~~~

He loses two more patients, a female Alpha and a male Beta. Both asked for referrals, preferably to another Beta. While the Alpha didn’t offer a reason, the Beta filled the silence between request and fulfillment by offering his stilted reasoning: “I...I just want a therapist that I can relate to. I just...feel more...comfortable that way. Y'know?"

Hannibal doesn’t fault them. They were kind and polite and modest and gracious and appreciative. He understands the importance of personal comfort, but he had worked with them for years.

At the end of the day, he pours himself a glass of wine to complement the baked, stuffed stomach of an architect and tries to forget.

~~~

It takes time, diligence, several phone calls, and a Google search, but Hannibal believes he has found the killer. He drives out to Richmond one afternoon and ends up at a small townhouse in the less affluent corner of the city. The house is brick with a small lawn in front and three-by-three concrete porch. The lawn is decent. It needs to be cut and the bushes at the front of the house should be watered, but the fence is well-kept and, when he peers through the window next to the porch, the inside looks tidy as well.

“You lookin’ for him?”

He turns to look at a skinny black woman with a doo-rag and a cigarette, smoking on the next porch over.

“Yes,” he says, stepping away from the front door. “Do you know where he is?”

The left hillock of the woman’s top lip stretches across her face. “Fuck if I do,” she says loudly. “He normally at work or at them queer bars in town. Never see him but at the ass-crack of dawn.” She breathes in, holds the smoke, breathes out. “You French?”

He shakes his head. “Thank you,” he says. “I will look for him elsewhere.” He returns to his car and drives away.

He finds a coffee shop to sit in and searches for queer bars in Richmond. If his profile is correct, the killer would prefer a bar with an older clientele. It would be in an upscale part of town, but it would be small, off the beaten path. A dive bar for the secretaries of CEOs, paralegals, and public accountants. By the time he finishes his first espresso, he has two potentials.

The first bar is a disappointment. The patrons are on the younger end of the profile’s age spectrum. It’s bright and attempting a frankly depressing atmosphere of contemporary trend and quirk. After two hours, more than a few pitiful glances, and a poor bordeaux, he moves on to the next one. This one is closer to what he was expecting. Slightly dark, but flush with warm colors and buzzing with excitable post-work conversation. He is still the oldest man in the room, but only by a handful of years. He takes his place at the bar, orders a glass of wine, and waits.

It’s an hour and a half later and he’s starting to think about leaving, finding a new bar or just heading home, when an arm emerges from the corner of his sight. He turns his head and sees a man in his fifties. He is blandly fit and wearing cheap department store clothing. His hair was originally brown but is now generously peppered with gray and white. He has a full, masculine face and hazel eyes. He smells like an Alpha, but something lingers around him. The sillage of his bond spoils him.

“Are you here by yourself?” he asks.

Hannibal nods. Moves his eyes quickly up and down the man’s body.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?”

Hannibal gestures to the stool next to him. “Please. I’m in the mood for company right now.”

“Something troubling you? Something with work?” the man asks. He raises a hand, asks the bartender for the regular.

“It’s somewhat related to work,” Hannibal says. “I was taking omegarone suppressants and washing with Beta ointment until very recently. Once I told my patients about the change, they’ve started leaving my practice.”

“Are you a doctor?” 

“A psychiatrist.”

The bartender places a glass of amber beer in front of the stranger. “That is awful,” he says, looking genuinely sympathetic. “Is it your own practice?”

“It is,” he says. “I haven’t lost enough to be concerned, but patients who were previously comfortable with me are edging closer to the door. It’s frustrating.” He looks at his new friend from the corner of his eye. “Compounded with a potential partner being obtuse...” He closes his eyes and sips his wine.

The man points at Hannibal. “I know that feeling. My ex could be so two-faced sometimes.” The man is silent for a few moments. He spins his glass with the help of the dew pooling around the bottom. “What about your gal?”

Hannibal shakes his head. “Not a woman. A man. A male Alpha.” He runs his finger around the lip of his wine glass. “He’s a colleague and a good friend and transparent, but hasn’t done anything to court me beyond scaring away other Alphas. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s marked his territory on my things and simply forgot to inform me.”

The man laughs. His cheeks dimple attractively. “If he’s being that slow, why don’t you make your move?”

“As independent and nontraditional as I am, I still appreciate a good courtship.” Hannibal moves his head so that his hair blocks his eyes. “Also, he is younger. In another year or two, he might want to pursue a family, children of his own. If that’s the case, he would have every right to leave me.” A heartbeat passes, then he drinks the end of his wine.

“That’s rough,” the man says. “I...I’ve been through some rough times, man. My ex, he...well, he was rough, but it was a good bond and a good relationship. And when he was gone it sucked and it took time but I healed. And the young ones will hurt you and the old ones will disappoint you, but there’s someone out there. There’s always someone.” He places his hand between them.

The corners of Hannibal’s mouth flutter up, and then fall down again. “I’ve said that for years, yet I’m starting to think that it’s the worst lie I’ve ever told.” He pushes the wine glass away. “Thank you for the conversation.”

“No, no,” the man says, leaning back. “Don’t. I’ll get you a drink.”

“Thank you,” Hannibal says, politely raising his hand and dipping his face away. “That is very kind.”

“No, it’s okay. I think you need it.”

Hannibal hesitates. He stares at the man, with his nearly-gray hair and his slightly bulging stomach and his workman’s hands. He meets his eyes. With a light smile, he says, “I tend not to accept drinks from strangers.”

The man’s smile nearly breaks his face in two. He holds out a hand. “Well then. I’m Peter.”

He shakes Peter's hand. "Hannibal."

Peter buys Hannibal another drink. He buys him another three drinks. They move from the bar to a booth. They are isolated in the corner but they still talk with hushed tones and bent heads. They talk about work, love, friends, hobbies, food, travel. Peter is a travelling nurse, he has been for nearly two years, specializing in labor and delivery.

“That’s an unusual specialty for an Alpha,” Hannibal says. His middle finger is limply tracing the lip of his glass. He is emphasizing his drunkenness with a loose spine, hooded eyes, and a quickness to smile. Peter is enraptured.

“Well...pregnancy has always fascinated me. Male Omega pregnancy especially. Like the physiology of your fertility. That should be impossible!” He gestures up and down at Hannibal. “You’re a fucking miracle.”

Hannibal laughs like it’s a witty compliment. Peter leans in closer. Their arms touch. The smell of his arousal is potent and suffocating.

“Do you stay in this state?”

“I’ve been moving East from Nevada for a while,” Peter admits. “My job here is ending soon and I’m a bit tired of Virginia. I need somewhere new to go.”

“If location is important, I wholeheartedly recommend Baltimore,” Hannibal says. “That is where I live and where my practice is located. It is a wonderful little city.”

Peter smiles. “I’ve never been to Maryland. I’ll see what my agency has there.” He finishes his third beer. He stands to get another and offers Hannibal another glass of wine, which Hannibal smilingly accepts.

It’s about one in the morning when they are asked to leave. They are the last ones in the bar. Hannibal is drunk. He had planned on driving back to Baltimore tonight but a hotel will be more prudent. He sways when he walks. Peter helps steady him with two large, square hands curled protectively around his bicep.

“You’re pretty out of it,” he says. Peter’s face is red and his words are jumbling together.

“You have no right to judge,” Hannibal says. He lays a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I need to get back to my car.”

“Why don’t you come home with me?” Peter asks. “I don’t think you’re safe for the road.”

“I don’t think so,” he says. He sees his car and leads crookedly towards it. “But thank you. You are far kinder than you should be.”

“It’s my privilege,” Peter says. They reach Hannibal’s car. Peter hovers close as Hannibal fishes for his car keys. The bready smell of his beer is soaking into Hannibal’s skin. He feel like he will sweat that smell for the next few days. He wants to scrub that smell, that sweat, and this man off of him.

When Hannibal has his keys in hand, he turns to face Peter. He is as tall as him. Looking forward is looking into his drab eyes.

“Thank you for tonight,” Hannibal says softly. He leans in and presses his lips to Peter’s. There is a shuddering inhale around his nose and a hand flutters up to Hannibal’s jaw. His lips are thin and dry and slightly chapped. The tip of Hannibal’s tongue laps at the seam of Peter’s lips. He tastes like copper and yeast. As Peter opens his mouth to invite Hannibal in, to taste the red, wine-soaked mouth himself, Hannibal pulls away. With hooded eyes and a shy smile, hair swinging in front of his face, he unlocks his car.

“Tha-- That...” Peter touches his lips. “Welcome,” he whispers. “You’re very welcome.”

Hannibal smiles at him one last time before getting into the car. He can see Peter staring at him in his side mirror, a hand on the roof of the car. He pulls out of the space, quite pleased with the work he’s done tonight.


	3. Chapter 3

Will opens his front door in his pajamas. He looks Hannibal up and down, sniffs, and says, “You look like shit.”

“Good morning to you as well,” he greets. “Did I wake you?”

“Kind of.” Will eyes Hannibal once more. He asks, “What are you doing here?”

Hannibal takes a deep breath. “I was driving back home from Richmond. I wanted to check on you.” He looks inside. A cluster of dogs is standing behind Will. Their large, baby-doll eyes focused on him. Tails wag in joyful recognition. “May I come in?”

Will stares at him for a few seconds longer. Hannibal wishes he would make up his mind. The morning air warns of a bad lightning storm. The humidity makes his heavy, aching head heavier and his thick, reeking skin more potent. He can still smell Peter’s putrid widower’s stench. Will is bound to smell it, recognize it as an imposition.

“I could make you breakfast,” he offers.

Will smirks, looks away, nods. He steps aside in the doorway to let Hannibal through. The dogs start barking. Will lifts a finger to his lips and shushes them. They fall silent in a matter of seconds and Will gestures to the open door, calls his dogs outside. The little herd jumps to its feet and sprints through the door. Will closes it behind them.

“I’ll make breakfast,” he says. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”

Hannibal doesn’t argue. He tries his best not to shuffle into the small, mostly wooden kitchen. Will passes him and opens his refrigerator. “Most of my food is stuff you’ve given me,” Will admits. “Is there anything you would prefer?”

He sits at Will’s two-person kitchen table. “I would appreciate coffee,” he says. “And anything salty.”

Will is smiling as he pulls out a carton of eggs and two Tupperwares, one full of sausage links, the other bacon. Hannibal doesn’t remember who those came from. He presses his thumb and index fingers into his eyes.

“What were you doing in Richmond?” Will asks as he fills his coffee maker with Maxwell House. He can’t help but sneer at its stale pretzel smell.

“I went to meet a friend,” he says. “We stayed out late. I didn’t want to drive drunk, so I stayed with him.”

The drip machine crackles to life. Will pulls out a packet of matches and uses them to ignite his stove top. “Is he an old friend?”

He shakes his head. “He’s a recent friend.”

The gurgling of Will’s coffee machine is not a fulfilling substitute for conversation. Will moves around the kitchen. He does it stiffly, distantly and automatically. The fire licks blue and orange at the bottom of the skillet. His shirt clings dark and wet against his back and under his arms. He can see Will’s spine, sharp and white, bending as he stoops down to flick a boning knife across Peter’s neck. As his blood pools at Will’s feet, staining lily white skin the deep rose of a rare steak, he slots the knife between the ribs to neatly pierce the heart and the lungs.

“Hannibal.”

He looks up from the corner of the table he had been staring at.

“How do you want your coffee?”

He wants Maxwell House at the bottom of a dumpster. “Very milky, please. No sugar.”

“Would you like some Advil with it as well?” Will can’t help his smirk.

He looks away. He hears Will chuckle and ignores the instinct to push his face into the bubbling skillet. Will places a mug in front of him, as well as a pair of red tablets. He waits until Will’s back is turned before placing them on his tongue and washing them down with the ungodly burnt-tasting poison.

“I keep thinking,” Will says as he shakes his skillet, “how obvious it was.” Will looks over his shoulder. “That you’re an Omega, I mean.” He turns back to the cooking food. “You’re caring, nurturing, naturally paternalistic.”

“I would recommend that you cease this line of conversation, Will,” he says with a warning edge. “You will sour a good breakfast.”

Will takes the sausages and bacon off of the skillet. Places them on a folded paper towel. Pulls out a pair of eggs from the carton at his elbow. “How do you like your eggs?”

“Scrambled,” he says.

Will cracks four eggs into the skillet and uses his spatula to move them around, mix the yolk and the albumin to make something sunny yellow and fluffy.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just...it’s been bothering me.”

Hannibal drinks his coffee. “What has?”

Will turns off the stove top. He takes out two plates and piles them with eggs, sausage, and bacon. Hannibal swallows the saliva building in his mouth. He carries the plates to the table before returning to his counters for salt, pepper, and utensils. He sits across from Hannibal and picks up his fork. He raises his head. Hannibal is salting his plate, but matches the rise in Will’s head. They look into each other’s eyes.

“I...” Will says. He stops himself. Stops breathing. “I...” he repeats, slower, quieter. Hannibal is certain of what Will is going to say. He can imagine himself leaning over the table once Will has confessed. He can see himself kissing Will, being led to the bedroom by him, letting him claim. He can see that ferocity, that protective nature that foams like a rabid animal. He would love to own it.

Will looks away. Squeezes his jaw tightly. “I...I’m not as good of a cook as you. It...It may not be up to your standards.”

He forks a small pile of egg. “I am in no state to judge your generosity.” He brings it to his mouth. He is too tired to put on a proper performance. Will is too emasculated to enjoy it if he did.

“What did you do last night?” Will asks, as if he couldn’t smell the sweaty beer and Alpha that’s clinging to Hannibal. He focuses on his plate. Shovels food into his mouth, unseemly.

“I met my friend and we went to a bar,” Hannibal says.

“How did you meet him?” Will asks.

Hannibal drinks his coffee. “He is a neurologist at UCLA. I consulted with him when you were first diagnosed. We kept in touch. He was in Richmond for a family emergency and wanted some company.”

“Oh.”

Hannibal looks up and sees Will’s sad, tired eyes.

“Are you having difficulties seeing me as a different sex?” Hannibal asks. Will looks embarrassed. He shakes his head. Hannibal moves the eggs around on his plate. “I would understand if you did. It is one thing for me to keep my privacy around patients, but you are not just a patient. You are my friend. We have taken care of each other during our worst moments. We have a connection. And you didn’t know an essential facet of my identity.” Hannibal cuts up his sausage and starts to mix it in with his scrambled eggs. “I cannot be sorry for keeping my secret, Will. But I am sorry that I have hurt you. If you can forgive me, I ask that you treat me exactly as you did before you found out. I would like to maintain our friendship.”

Will leans back in his chair. He taps his fingers against the table top. “Are you ashamed of it? Of being an Omega?”

“Not at all,” Hannibal says. “I am ashamed of others’ reactions to my Omegahood.” He collects egg and sausage and a corner of bacon on his fork and carries it to his mouth.

“How?” Will asks. "What do people do?"

Hannibal swallows. “When I was twelve, I was chased down by a hunter who had caught my scent at the beginning of a heat. He wanted to marry me and stood outside of my orphanage until one of the sisters came out to talk to him. If he hadn’t been Jewish, I would've been given away with little thought to my well-being.” That man had screamed obscenities and threats at the sisters. He would burn the building down if he didn’t get the Omega bitch. He would shoot them all and pull the little cunt out by his hair. “That,” he continues, “is an extreme. But until I started masking my scent, there was the constant feeling of being watched. Examined. Like was I meat. Strangers would yell at me, whistle at me, try to touch me and then blame me when I reacted with hostility. As an Omega, I was expected to be passive and kind and nurturing. As a Beta, I was expected to act as if I wasn't there.” He takes another forkful of egg and sausage. "You can read meaning and pattern into my hobbies, my mannerisms, and my behaviors. I can not and will not stop you. But I act the way I do because I am Hannibal. I was Hannibal before. I will always be Hannibal.”

“Are you going to miss it?” Will asks. His voice is a soft trail of wind. "The anonymity."

“I already do.”

~~~

_EXCLUSIVE: The last person to see Thomas Maxwell alive steps forward. In an interview, sat exclusively with TattleCrime.com, she describes the last night he walked as a free man..._

~~~

Will offers to let Hannibal sleep off his hangover at his house. It's Saturday. Hannibal doesn't have any patients. Will doesn't have any classes. He accepts and Will leads him to the bedroom.

Hannibal goes to sleep almost instantly. He dreams of Will in his primitive habitat, bloody and triumphant, presenting Hannibal with pounds of dripping flesh and warm soft meats in bags thrown carelessly over his shoulder. Hannibal, in return, cooks a feast. Haggis, stuffed hearts, roasted lungs, marrow stew; his entire cookbook made and laid out in front of them, fed to each other by hand with teasing tongues and slow teeth.

Four hours later, he is woken by the sounds of agitated pacing. Wil's stilted voice flutters up from beneath the bedroom door. Hannibal lifts his head from the pillow. His clothing is folded and neatly stacked on the dresser. He passes by them and opens the door.

He finds Will pacing in his sitting room, a hand held against his eyes. He has put on different clothes. The sweat-drenched gray tee has been replaced with a loose-fitting off-white and black one. He is wearing old blue jeans and has put on a pair of hearty brown leather boots. He doesn't see Hannibal, wearing only a tight pair of blue boxer briefs. He wonders what Will will do with the pillow he had slept on.

"I know it doesn't match what I said!" Will says. "I saw the evidence and gave you a profile based on what I saw." He turns to pace and catches sight of Hannibal. He looks, openly and hungry, and then continues in his turn. The look lasts for little more than a second, but the embarrassment at having been caught lasts. Combined with his agitation, it's quite fetching.

"Didn't anyone interview friends and family?" Will asks. He covers his eyes with the palm of his hand. After a few dozen seconds, he says. "Don't yell at me because a trainee makes a bad call!"

Will stops in the middle of the room. His hand slides down his face. "Do you want me there?" Will bends down to pet a dog that has come to sit at his heel. "I'll be there as soon as I can." Will hangs up. He continues to pet the dog. "Are you feeling better?"

"Significantly," he answers. "What has happened?"

Will dares a glance at him. "Freddie Lounds happened." He walks past Hannibal, to the kitchen, where his keys are kept. "She posted an interview with the last person to see Thomas Maxwell alive. Which normally wouldn't matter, but it turns out when she tried to contact us to tell us that her friend went home with a male Alpha the night he disappeared, the trainee who wrote down her information didn't give it to anyone."

"Why not?"

"The trainee had heard that I said the killer was a female Omega." 

He blinks. Lifts his eyebrows and asks, "Have you been wrong before?"

"Of course I've been wrong." Will puts his keys in his pocket. “I’m sorry. I have to leave right now.”

He nods. “If you can spare a few minutes, I will put my clothes on--”

“No, no.” Will places an independent key on the countertop. “I’ll just leave the key here and you can lock up when you’re ready.” Will rushes past. “I’ll see you later.”

~~~

He sees Will the next day. Will is interrupting the beginning of his dinner: ravioli filled with minced pieces of interior designer, served in a savory red wine sauce. Will looks upset. Hannibal is reminded of the months when Will was falling apart, when the world and his mind was turning against him. A glimmer of desperation and fear tickles his olfactories. Hannibal invites him in and gives him his untouched plate.

"Please," he says , gesturing to the plate. "You look like you haven't slept."

Will takes the fork lying on the side of the plate. He pokes the raviolis, shifts them around in the sauce. "I didn't sleep very well last night."

He fishes out the remainder of his pastas. "Have the nightmares returned?"

Will laughs humorlessly. "The nightmares never went away, Doctor. They just changed." Will uses the side of his fork to cut the ravioli into little squares. Swirls them around in the red sauce, thickening from the extra cheese.

He drizzles sauce onto his new plate and sets it on the edge of corner perpendicular to Will. "What have your nightmares become?"

Will swallows nothing. Hannibal's eyes are drawn to the sporadic twitch of his Adam's apple. Finally, Will brings food to mouth, buying himself precious moments of silence.

"We still don't know anything," Will says after swallowing. "The witness swears that Maxwell left with a male Alpha in his fifties the night before he was reported missing. She didn't see any female Omegas that night or even any other females. And certainly no pregnant Omegas."

"Are you revising your original profile?"

"Yeah," Will says. "White male Alpha in his fifties. Works as a traveling medic of some kind. A nurse in maternity wards or a traveling doula. Something that brings him into contact with pregnant Omegas. Angry at an ex-partner who fits the description of the victims but isn’t one." Will takes another mouthful. "He has a lot of anger and a history of domestic abuse."

"You're still unsure about the urine."

Will puts his fork down. "I don't understand. It takes time and energy to collect as much urine as we're finding on the corpses. Is it sexual? Is it humiliation? Why not use his own urine, then? Is it to throw us off his trail? Is there anything special about pregnant Omega urine that I don't know about but he does?"

Hannibal swallows his first bite of dinner. "Perhaps he does." Will looks at Hannibal, the first time since he got to the house. "If his profession requires him to understand the physiology of pregnancy, then perhaps he understands the folklore surrounding it. Maternity support is a rare profession for an Alpha, after all."

"He's obsessed with pregnancy." He skewers a globule of pasta. "Did you ever want kids?"

"No," he answers quickly. 

"Me neither." He pauses and digs around his plate. "Did people find that odd?"

"A physician in Paris once recommended that I get pregnant as a way of levying my heats," Hannibal says. "He was very concerned when I refused and insisted on medication."

"He's obsessed with pregnancy," Will repeats, "but he's kidnapping men who are unlikely to become pregnant."

"He's educated," Hannibal says, "and intelligent, but delusional."

"He might be practicing," Will says. "Working up to the real target. The real treasure."

~~~

One of his patients asks if he's taking on any more patients. He says he might be and asks for the details on the prospective patient.

"Well," the female Beta starts, "it's my niece. She's been having a very difficult last few months. My brother and his wife are getting a divorce and she's just not been dealing very well. I wanted to recommend you, ‘cause you’re an Omega like her and she might respond better to you, but I didn’t know if you were even taking on anyone else."

He presses his molars together. He is tempted to tell her that he’s not. That his specialty is not in brats with pedestrian problems he can alleviate with clichéd pop psychological courtesies, but patients with legitimate issues, legitimate minds. He doesn’t want to fall asleep one night and wake up to find his practice full of whinging adolescents. He wants to tell her no. He tells her that she is welcome to recommend him, he will be willing to sit for a meeting with the girl and her parents, but the final decision needs to be made by her and her parents. She smiles, seems to be relieved. When their session ends and she leaves and he is left with a free hour, he returns home and takes stock.

~~~

Will is prompt for his night session. Hannibal guides him in.

“How has your day been?” he asks.

Will rubs his face. “It’s not been going well,” he says. “We’re still stumped for motive and directly contacting nursing agencies and hospitals has not been helpful. Apparently, hospitals are incapable of efficient bookkeeping when it comes to their nurses. The agencies we’ve contacted have confidentiality agreements. They’re not allowed to release records without a warrant and we can’t get a warrant without evidence.”

“Have you gone to the bar? Perhaps they have security cameras--?”

“Jack is in the process of collecting the footage. Maybe by tomorrow we’ll have a face. And, if we’re lucky, a name.”

Will sits on the edge of the chaise lounge. Hannibal stands several feet away, his hands in his pockets, studying Will carefully. The dark circles and lines are returning. His face is growing more and more pallid. He wonders if he has been taking his medicine.

“I may be able to help you with motive,” Hannibal offers.

Will looks up, wide-eyed. “You could?”

“Perhaps,” he says. He turns on the ball of his foot and walks towards the ladder leading to his mezzanine. “I did some research on urine produced during pregnancy. Since it is the way our bodies expel liquid and chemical waste, urine often has a cocktail of hormones in it.” He reaches the ladder, climbs. “That is why home pregnancy tests has the individual pee on a chemical strip. Urine is easy to produce and test if you know what you’re looking for.” He reaches the second level. Walks down the path. Looks down on Will, who stares like he’s trapped. 

“After the sex-related hormones were isolated and identified, pregnancy tests became more reliable. In the mid-nineteen hundreds, immature female lab rats would be injected with the urine of the individual being tested.” He reaches the corner where he stores his own published materials. He takes out his handkerchief and gently eases out a notebook with a broken paper and bark spine, bound in twine and hair. “If the rats’ sex organs developed rapidly, the mother was pregnant.”

He tucks the book against his chest. He climbs back down. Will is standing now.

“However,” Hannibal continues, heading towards his desk, “Medieval physicians and midwives had observed a connection between an expectant mother’s urine and its effects on others.” He places the handkerchief and the book on top of his desk. Opens it. Hears Will slowly make his way over to him. “Many superstitions suggest the application of an expectant mother’s urine to cure ails and infertility. Some even reputed that pregnant Omega urine had extraordinary abilities.” He stops at the right page. Will is at his side now, staring down. Hannibal can feel his temperature, smell his exhaustion. He sees the fluttering of Will’s eyes as he breathes Hannibal in.

“I don’t understand what this...”

“It’s very poorly written in my mother tongue,” Hannibal explains. He points at the eighth line of scrabbly handwriting. “ _‘The ingestion of pregnant Omega urine of any form will result in the individual entering a heat unforeseen by their natural cycle’_.” He looks at Will’s concerned, confused face.

“Is that possible?” Will asks.

“Only if the individual is already prone to heats or pseudo-heats,” Hannibal says. “HCG is the hormone produced during the first stages of pregnancy. It helps promote vascular growth in the uterus by prompting the production of progesterone, the hormone that thickens the uterine lining during a cycle. It also inhibits omegarone production, which is activated by progesterone and which prepares the body for heat. The extra progesterone will spur a state of fertility in a fecund body and, in Omegas and some Betas, start a period of heat.”

“He should know all that,” Will says. “He knows about pregnancy, he works with pregnant men and women every day. So why...”

Will’s fingertips slide down the crumbling tan page. “Our killer is trying to make an Omega,” he whispers. He licks his lips. “But not...not just any Omega. He has a very specific vision.” Will looks up. Their eyes meet. There is that fear, that panic that makes blue eyes iridescent. “He...he wants...”

Hannibal looks away. Lets his jaw slacken in his mouth.

“I should call Jack,” Will says. It sounds painful for him. “I’ll... Thank you.” 

Will leaves. Hannibal closes his book with a creaking thump.

~~~

Hannibal has some paperwork to file, so it's another half hour or so before he finishes up at his office and heads home. He isn’t surprised when he finds Will there, sitting in his car. Staring forlornly at the dark house.

He approaches the idle, dark car. Will doesn’t try to hide himself or his embarrassment. He rolls down the window as Hannibal reaches the car.

“How long have you been here?” he asks.

Will bites the side of his cheek. “I came straight from your office.”

Hannibal nods. He glances at the acerbic green light of the radio. 8:15; nearly forty-five minutes. “If you are here to protect me,” he says, “I recommend coming inside.” He looks at Will. Will refuses to look at him. “The house is far more comfortable.”

Will sighs. He opens his door and follows.

Hannibal offers him a drink when they’re inside. Will doesn’t respond. He follows Hannibal into the kitchen and takes a seat at the island. Puts his face in his hands as Hannibal pours them each a glass of wine.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Will admits.

“You are reverting to old habits,” Hannibal says. “When you were sick, you would come to me when you were frightened. Are you scared now?”

Will nods.

Hannibal drinks to his affirmation.

“Would you like dinner?” he asks as he takes off his jacket.

“There’s no reason for me to be this scared, though. There’s...there’s no way...” Will sighs and lets his hands fall to the countertop.

Hannibal lays his folded jacket on one of the chairs. Something comforting, he thinks, and simple. He is very hungry right now. Stir fry, maybe, using precut and unused food. “Your fear is transparent,” Hannibal says, rolling up his shirt sleeves. Will finally looks at him, mildly insulted. “There is someone trying to steal someone who belongs to you. This stranger doesn’t know your loved one exists, but will not stop until he finds them. Because this threat is real but improbable you find yourself stuck as to how to protect me.” He sees the fearful transformation in Will’s expression as he wraps an apron around his waist. “I would feel the same way if you were threatened. I would do anything to protect my friend. And I would be just as frustrated.”

He sees Will glance away as he pulls out a wok and starts piling ingredients from the fridge into it.

“You don’t belong to me,” Will whispers. He finally picks up his glass.

“Perhaps not,” Hannibal agrees, equally quiet.

He has greased the wok and let it sit on the stove to heat up, has set the water in a pot to boil, and has moved on to chopping leeks and carrots, broccoli and bean sprouts when he asks Will. “Have you ever had sex with an Omega during a heat?”

Will’s eyes widen. He chokes on his wine. “Th-That came out of nowhere.”

“I don’t believe so,” he says. “You are currently working on a case where an Alpha is trying to induce a heat so that he may have an intense sexual experience and, if all goes well, a child.” He checks the boiling water. Collects his dry noodles and dumps them in. “I have never had the opportunity to have sex during a heat, which historically have been torturously painful for me, so I am cynical.” Hannibal looks up. Will is blushing. “Have you ever had the chance?”

Will opens his mouth, then closes it. He wipes his fingers across his lips, and then tries again. “I, I haven’t, no. I’ve dated Omegas, but they were on drugs or just didn’t want to.”

“And you respected their wishes,” Hannibal says.

Will nods. Hannibal smiles. He crushes a clove of garlic with the edge of his blade.

“Have you ever had sex before?” Will asks timidly.

“Of course,” he responds. “But I haven’t had a partner in a very long time.”

“How long?”

He checks the noodles. Stirs them. “A little over a decade.” He glances at Will. Sees his shocked and almost pitiful expression. “And you? Your last partner?”

“Just before I started working for the FBI,” he says. “You really haven’t dated in a decade?”

“I have dated,” Hannibal explains, enjoying the moment of honesty, “and had small affairs, but I have not had any partners.”

“Why not?”

He dumps the chopped vegetables into the wok. They sizzle on impact. “I imagine for the same reasons you haven’t.”

Will considers the statement. Hannibal can still see the disbelief texturing his face, but doesn’t say another word. Will drinks and watches Hannibal as he swirls the vegetables around the wok. Adds sesame seeds, a touch of red peppers, and the pre-cut back meat of the interior decorator he had used a few nights ago. Adds the softened noodles, adds pepper and soy sauce and fish oil. Pushes the meal round and round until, finally, the meat is a tender medium, the noodles are a savory gold, and the crackling smell of vegetables sparks in the air. He turns off the stove top and turns around to take out a couple of flat-bottomed bowls.

“Would you be disappointed if we didn’t move into the dining room?” Hannibal asks.

“Casual dining with the spectacular Dr. Lecter?” Will says smilingly. Hannibal smiles as well. “How could I refuse?” He serves Will, then himself. He tops off their wine and takes off his apron. He digs out a couple pairs of chopsticks for Will and himself before sitting down to eat.

~~~

Will spends the night in the guest room. Hannibal gets up early enough to cook them frittata and chorizo. While the coffee was finishing, Will enters the kitchen, touching the back of his head.

"Good morning," he greets. "How did you sleep?"

Will shrugs. "I only woke up once during the night." He looks at the food that is minutes from being finished and says, "Is this the third meal we've had in a row together?"

Hannibal thinks for a moment. "No," he says with a head shake. His unstyled hair flops around his forehead. "You did not have breakfast with me yesterday and we didn't see each other at all on Sunday." He smiles. “We could, if you returned tonight.”

Will smiles. Hannibal fixes them two mugs and places one in front of Will.

“Do you want me to come back?”

Hannibal delicately stirs milk into his coffee. “Yes. I enjoy your company.”

He sees the corner of Will smile, pick up his mug, drink his coffee.

“Would you like your house key back?” he asks. “I took it with me on Saturday. I didn’t know where to safely put it.”

“You’re only asking about it now?” Will asks incredulously. “I haven’t given much thought to that key, or my house. You could’ve really cleaned me out and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

“Tempting,” Hannibal says, “but I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what to do with half a dozen dogs and some fishing poles.”

Will laughs, tries to sound playfully offended as he says, “That’s not all that’s in my house. You don’t know. There could be a safe full of diamonds.” Hannibal smirks. “I could have ten million dollars squirreled away somewhere, and you would never know.”

“Or, perhaps, I do,” he says. He raises his eyebrows as he drinks his coffee.

Will laughs again. He stares at the corner of Hannibal’s island. He shakes his head after a few silent moments. “You can keep the key. I trust you not to rob me.”

“Then I should return the courtesy.” Hannibal leaves the kitchen to fetch a spare key from the lockbox in his home office. He returns to the kitchen to see a confused and intrigued Will half-leaning on the island’s countertop, holding his mug halfway to his face. When he sees the jagged silver metal in Hannibal’s hand, he flushes.

“No. No, that’s really nice of you,” he insists, “but that’s--”

“I insist,” he says. He takes Will’s free hand and presses the key directly in the center of his palm. “Your trust for mine.” He curls Will’s calloused fingers into a blunt, square fist. His fingertips grace over the thin skin of his wrist, where the robin egg’s blue of his veins meet the fresh peach of his skin.

When Hannibal looks up, he sees an enraptured Will.

“Deal,” he says with a breathless, crackling voice.

~~~

The niece of his patient arrives with her parents at the end of the day. Her father is a functioning alcoholic. His dreams were “crushed” years ago and now he gets by on a handle of vodka and the athletic successes of his daughter. Her mother is a passive aggressive enabler with acceptance issues. She probably had a pair of absentee parents, and doesn’t want the same for her daughter. Divorce is their ultimate failure.

The daughter is a time bomb of mute, quivering rage. She comprehends more than her parents know. The mother’s stifling need for attention and the father’s overwhelming need to give attention is a crushing atmosphere. He thinks the divorce will be good for her.

After he has had his fill of the parents, he excuses them to speak privately with the daughter. When they are gone, he asks, “What would you like to achieve in therapy, Claire?”

Claire shrugs. She looks him in the eye like it’s a learned act. “I didn’t want therapy, Dr. Lecter. I was just told it would be good for me.”

“By your parents?”

“My aunt,” she says. “She cares about me more than my parents.”

“How have you come to this conclusion?”

“I was diagnosed with AS when I was four,” she says. “She paid for my acting classes so that I could learn how to interact with people.”

“You don’t think your parents did anything about it?” he asks.

“I know they didn’t do anything,” she answers. “To admit that there was something wrong with me would to admit there was something wrong with them.” Her voice cracks twice with the word ‘wrong’. “I have my ways of coping, Dr. Lecter, and it doesn’t involve paying to talk to strangers.”

“Proactivity in your mental health is important,” he says, “but sometimes our habits are not the healthiest. Having an objective third party can be very helpful.”

“And you can be objective?” she asks. “You have a big financial incentive to keep me here and talking. I don’t think that makes you fully removed.”

He smirks.

“I cannot force you into a treatment that you do not want to take part in,” he says. “I can only advise that you return here. Or, if you do not like me, I can recommend several other--”

There is a harsh knocking on the patient’s entrance. Claire launches out of her chair. Comes to a kneeling position next to the chaise, clinging to the side, hyperventilating and glancing around panickedly. Hannibal kneels by her side and places a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me,” she hisses.

“Hannibal!” Will shouts on the other side of the door. He knocks again.

She crawls away from him. Gets on her feet when she reaches the end of the chaise and storms towards the exit. “Fuck. This,” she says, her voice catching wetly on her words. He has a feeling as she leaves, slamming the door on her way, that he will never see her again. A shame; any child who reacted so violently to a knocking door would have been enjoyable to unravel.

The knocking comes again. The door handle jiggles, but will not open. He can feel his frown ripple through his face. He strides to the waiting room door and nearly breaks the lock as he opens the door. He spreads his arms and legs to better bar Will from the office.

Will is red-faced and breathing heavily. His hands are balled at his hips and a vein is popping in his neck.

“You are being exceptionally rude, Will,” he scolds. “I was in a meeting. You could have just cost me a patient.”

Will puts his hands on the doorway. Leans into Hannibal’s personal space. “You’ve pulled some bullshit, Hannibal, but I didn’t think you would go as low as you have.”

He doesn’t know whether to be shocked, afraid, or indignant. “Exactly what are you accusing me of, Will?”

“You didn’t meet a friend in Richmond,” Will hisses.

Hannibal raises his chin. He considers Will a moment longer. Swallows. Will is bubbling, heating the air around him unbearably with his ever-present anger, fear, and need to protect. The temperature had finally fallen low enough that Hannibal could breathe without worrying about drowning. Will, his proximity, his outpouring of emotion manifest in explosive energy, is making him breathless once again.

Hannibal stands down. Walks further into his office. Will follows, but quickly veers off into an unplanned circumambulation of the office. Hannibal takes a seat in his leather chair.

“I didn’t,” he affirms.

“Why were you there, Hannibal?” Will asks. It is an odd combination of breathy and stilted.

“I was there to go home with a man,” Hannibal says. He lays a hand on the chair arm. Stares at his tapping fingers.

“You went home with a murder suspect!” Will hisses.

Hannibal’s head snaps up. “I didn’t go home with anyone,” he defends harshly. “And how was I to know the man I had been speaking to all night was a murder suspect?”

“You shouldn’t have even been in Richmond!” Will insists. He is throwing his arms around dramatically. His hands are stiff, thumbs standing out. “There are plenty of queer bars in Baltimore and D.C. Hell, D.C. is full of them. But you, no, you can’t have anything simple, so you drive over two hours to go to Richmond and flirt with a man looking to kidnap and rape an Omega fitting your description.”

“I didn’t know, Will,” he says sternly. “If I had, don’t you think I would’ve called the police?” He closes his eyes and digs his fingers into the leather of his chair. “I tried the bars in Baltimore and D.C. They’re full of young men searching for young men. Richmond was the first city with an age-appropriate establishment.”

“You shouldn’t be looking for one-night stands!” Will claims, voice climbing higher in pitch and desperation.

Hannibal opens his eyes. Will stands behind the opposite arm chair. One hand clings to the back. The other extends in Hannibal’s direction.

“I am a grown, unattached man,” Hannibal says precisely. “I can act as I please.”

“You’re going to get into trouble that way!” Both of Will’s hands clasp the chair back. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

“You’re being childish.”

“I’m childish?” Will mocks, mouth spreading into an amused and cruel smile. “You’re the one having a mid-life crisis.”

Hannibal clenches his fingers into a fist. Extends them. Clenches them again. “You’re not angry because I nearly had an affair with a murderer. You’re angry because the murderer wasn’t you.”

That, it seems, freezes Will. He even appears to have stopped breathing.

“You are an intelligent man, Will,” Hannibal continues. “You would have to be blinding yourself with an indecent amount of denial to not acknowledge your feelings, or to delude yourself into believing that your feelings are even remotely hidden. You associate yourself with experts at recognizing and categorizing human behavior.”

Will swallows. Stands straight but keeps his hands on the chair. "If you knew why didn't you do anything?"

"It is unethical for me to involve myself in my patient's personal--"

"So you invite all of your patients to your house for dinner, then?" Will says calmly. "You always bring them food when they're sick in hospital and you help take care of their pets?" He leans into the chair. "Don't use that ethical boundary crap on me, Doctor Lecter, you abandoned that ages ago. Why didn't you do anything?"

Hannibal looks away. Licks his lips. "They are not my feelings to act upon. I can only wait until you are ready to act upon them." He breathes slowly. "And," he continues, "make my own feelings known as subtly as you have made yours."

Will doesn't understand. He stares, eyes squinted, forehead wrinkled, knuckles white on the back of the chair. Then, he does. His entire body relaxes, loose from the revelation, the release of tense examination and over-examination. The pushing and pulling of evidence, placing it around and around the board until it resembles a cyclops more than it does the truth. Undoubtedly he feels stupid, just like when he found out about Hannibal's biological sex, but this time he can't blame his stupidity on masks and perfumes and medications. He has only himself and his own insecurities to blame.

"You didn't go home with him," Will says, head hung.

Hannibal shakes his head. "I was going to. We were there until the bar closed. We kissed on the sidewalk, but just as we were about to go to his home I thought about you. How he wasn't you." He tips his head to the side. "Why didn't you act on your feelings earlier?"

Will breathes out. Speaks to the desk. "I like what we have."

"What we have is standing water, Will." Hannibal laces his fingers together. "It will sour and corrode the longer it stagnates. I believe that it has already begun to eat away at us."

Will's eyes roam over Hannibal's body. His long limbs. His confident pose. He says, softly, "I love you and I don't know what to do about it."

"What do you want to do about it? Do you want to let your love fester and erode your patience, our friendship, itself? Or do you want to do something about it? Take what you want."

Will shakes his head. "I don't want to take--."

He leans forward, rests his forearms on his knees. "You have a fully willing partner. Take."

Will doesn't move. He remains behind the chair, staring, eyes climbing up the lines of his legs, over the acute hinge of his thighs and hips, up slim cylinder of torso before lingering, finally, on brown almond eyes. He swallows. Steps out from behind the chair. Approaches cautiously. Maintains eye contact, the force of which is like a hand on Hannibal's chest, pushing him farther and farther back with each step. They never stop staring at each other.

When Will reaches him, he hovers. Breaks contact to see Hannibal’s lips, his nose, his hair, eyebrows, cheeks. His legs are spread, one between Hannibal’s outstretched ones, the other hugging the corner of the armchair. He leans over, holds his weight on his right arm, bent and resting on the back of the chair, behind Hannibal’s neck. His breath is still muggy, but the vertigo it causes is a different breed from before. Hannibal breathes it in, eyes fluttering shut.

Rough fingertips run down the sallow planes of Hannibal’s face, starting at the harsh juts of his cheekbones, down cool complexion, over red lips that come ajar at the suggestion of warmth. A thumb wipes across his cheek. He tips his head. Lips find Will’s wrist and pucker against the pulse. The thumb curls and slides under the shelf of Hannibal’s chin. Tips his head up. There is a warning gust of breath before lips fall on his.

Will kisses softly. His lips capture, release, and capture in an undulation not unlike the way water laps at the side of a boat. His lips are perfect. Soft and moist, full of blood and warmth, with a hint of being roughly bitten. He bites them teasingly. A graze of uneven incisors against malleable pink flesh. Will huffs and opens his mouth, setting free the wild monstrosity of his tongue. It slithers past red lips and laps testingly, gently. Hannibal lifts a hand to keep Will’s head still. Runs it down his rough cheek. Digs his fingers into dry, curly hair. The hand keeping his head tilted fans out across his neck. The fingers casually run horizontally across the striations of muscle and organ. The thumb caresses his Adam’s apple. The hard palm moves downward, propelled by the circular motions of the fingertips, until they have reached the collar of his shirt.

Will curls a finger around the knot of Hannibal’s tie and breaks their kiss. Hannibal gasps. He opens his eyes and sees a bright flush and indecently parted lips. “I want you naked,” Will growls. Hannibal doesn’t stop the high-pitched, aroused whimper that is wrenched from him.

“You need to be put under police protection,” he says. “You’re a valuable witness.” The arm supporting Will's weight curls around Hannibal's head. "Did you give the suspect any personal information? Something he could use to track you down?"

"My first name," he answers, "the city I live in, and my profession. He was quite drunk, but he might be able to remember my license plate and car."

Will hisses, "Shit," and kisses Hannibal's forehead. "You're going to have to stay with someone."

“As long as it’s you,” Hannibal mutters. He moves his hand deeper into Will’s hair. “I want it to be you.”

They kiss again, lips dragging slowly apart. “It might be for a while,” Will says. “Until we know you’re out of harm’s way.”

"I'll need to pack something," Hannibal says. "Clothes--"

"You won't be wearing a lot of anything for very long," Will says, more hot breath and the movement of his lips than audible words.

He tugs Will's head back. "I refuse to wear your clothing. Or use your toothbrush."

Will smiles. He nods and, with painful reluctance, pulls away. "We should move quickly."

Hannibal agrees as he stands.

~~~

They kiss after stopping in front of his house. Hannibal suspects this is how a teenager is supposed to feel. Lightheaded and heavy; aware of the gravity that pulls them to the ground, but disregarding it with easy rebellion. He chuckles as he pulls away. He is far too old for this feeling, far too composed. But Will seems to be hooking on, if his drugged smile means anything. This feeling, as well as the ones to follow, will be quite advantageous.

"I will be quick," he promises.

"Do you want me to go in with you?"

He shakes his head. "It's only an overnight bag and a few things. I shouldn't be more than a few minutes."

He kisses Will's cheek and neck. Gets out of the car and walks to his front door. He notices, when he enters, the stale, warm scent of widowhood hanging in the air. He runs up his staircase, loudly pulls his overnight suitcase from his walk-in. Simple clothes, he thinks. A few buttoned Polos and a few pairs of underwear, neatly but quickly stacked. He moves around his bedroom, matching creak for creak, as he digs around his bottom shelves for a pair of shoes that he doesn't mind getting dirty.

He starts to stand when an arm hooks around his neck, the hinge of the elbow slotted firmly under his chin. He kicks his feet out underneath him, dropping his weight to the floor. He claws at the shirt sleeve and lifts his chin, trying to open his throat enough to breathe deeply enough to shout. A white cloth presses against his face. He kicks harder when he recognizes the suffocating sweetness of chloroform. Thrashes his head around. Digs his fingernails into the skin of the hand holding the rag.

"Don't be scared, darling. It's only me."

Taking large gasps of chloroform is making the gas enter his lungs faster. His legs and arms grow weightier and weightier. The man behind him lets him settle onto the floor, lets him lay his head against the crux of his armpit as he falls asleep.


	4. Chapter 4

He opens his eyes to brown darkness and bitter, stinging ammonia. He is lying face-down on a cool concrete floor. There are several rags tied around his face: one against his nose, one in his mouth, the last covering the bottom half of his face like a mask. His head aches. He closes his eyes. Adjusts his head so that his cheek is lying against the concrete. His arms are stiff--pulled tightly behind his back and tied, hands lashed to elbows. His ankles and knees are tied as well. Rope twisted tightly around both joints, intended to immobilize. He can bend his knees and extend his feet, but cannot pull his legs apart. He shifts his hips. He thinks he can make himself roll--but he hears the heavy jingle of metal against the floor. He turns his head. He is attached by the lashings of his ankles to a dirty chain with little more than two feet of length between him and the toggle in the wall the chain is attached to.

Well planned, he concedes. He lays his head down. He is trying to keep his tongue away from the urine-soaked gag, but the muscles of his mouth are tired. He doesn’t know how much longer he can keep himself from relaxing.

He lays in the darkness for several minutes, moving his head, his upper body, and his hips as much as he can afford to get a good look around the room. As far as he can tell, the room is a basement. Nine feet by nine feet, with a set of stairs that lead up to the house proper, no windows. The washer and dryer, less than a foot away from his head, are off-white and no younger than five years old. He rolls into the wall to see what is behind him: a gas water heater and another wall. The room is utterly plain and hopeless. Very well planned, he admires.

When he settles himself, he hears a door open. A light streams down the staircase--old, split, light-toned wood aged and appearing tea-stained. Boots run down the stairs. Their weight and confidence shake the structure. Peter appears from behind a half-wall that is attached to the ceiling and separates the top half of the stairs from the basement. He carries something. Stops at the bottom of the stairs and stares at him. From the half-moon silhouette cast from the top of the house, Hannibal can see him smile.

“Hello darling.”

He turns on the light. Hannibal twists and shuts his eyes. He groans at the brightness, the nausea.

“I’m sorry you had to wait for me,” Peter says. His boots echo through the little room. “I wanted to be wake you up earlier, but you looked so sweet.”

The boot sounds stop. Hannibal pries his eyes open enough to see Peter kneeling in front of him. He closes his eyes, starting to water, when a hand cups his neck. It guides his head up--he shivers as he is reminded of Will’s hand splayed across his neck. How long ago was that? His head is lowered onto a thin pillow. He can feel the concrete beneath it.

“Is that better, darling?”

A hand runs over his hair. Digs into the short hairs at the back of his head, just above the knots of his gags.

“You must be thirsty,” Peter says. He runs his hand over Hannibal’s hair again. “I’ll be right back.” His boots scuffle as he stands, reverberate as he walks away, up the stairs. He sounds like an earthquake on the floor above.

Hannibal opens his eyes again. They still sting against the light. He forces them to stay open. He needs to know where he is.

Not much is different from the dark basement and the lit one. He can see that the sump pump is hidden under the staircase, in the far corner, opposite the washer and dryer. There is a gap between the washer and dryer, large enough to put a laundry basket between the machines, but little else. The walls and floor are the same painted burgundy color. He groans and pushes his face into the pillow.

Peter clomps down the stairs. Hannibal turns his head to see him with a cup of water and a small plate of food. He kneels next to him and places the food and water just out of reach of Hannibal’s sight. “I’m going to take the gag off, darling,” he says calmly. “I’m doing it so you can have something to eat. If you bite me, I’ll take the food away and leave you hungry and in the dark for another day.”

Hannibal watches him carefully as he reaches to untie the half-mask's knot, then the gag. A hand rests underneath his chin, encouraging softly for him to lift his head. Peter smiles. "You're so good," he whispers. He lifts a luke-warm glass of water to his lips. Hannibal becomes aware of the crusting of salt in his mouth, the stale ammonia clinging to the back of his throat. Drinking water will drain any extra chemicals out of his mouth and further into his body. He doesn't want to drink, wants this process to last for as long as possible, give Will enough time to find him. But his tongue occupies his mouth like dead mouse. His sinuses are growing dusty and painful. He opens his mouth. The water tips in, some of it falling down the sides of his mouth, but most of it being caught in the scalloped pockets of his lips. That vile hand pets him again.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting. I had a lot to do before I could come get you.” Fingers scratch behind his ear. “And you must’ve been so impatient, darling. I know you came by my old house. My neighbor told me that you came by a few days after we met.”

Peter takes the cup away from his mouth. Puts it out of Hannibals’ reach.

“I know what you’re doing,” Hannibal says. “What you’re trying to do.”

Peter picks up an apple slice. “I’m only trying to take care of you.”

“My boyfriend--”

“You don’t have a boyfriend,” Peter says harshly.

“My boyfriend works for the FBI,” he continues. “He’s working on your case. He will find me and he will put you in jail.”

“Really?” Peter asks. He tips his head to the side. Curls his fingers in Hannibal’s hair. Scrapes his fingers against the curve of his scalp. “You don’t have a boyfriend. But pretty soon, you’ll have a husband. And then a child.” He holds the apple slice up to Hannibal’s mouth. “Wouldn’t that be nice, darling? An entire little family.”

He turns his head away.

“You’re not hungry, darling?” His hand travels farther down, over his neck and shoulders. “That’s okay. You had an exciting day. I’ll bring you food later.” A hard press of chapped lips against the back of his head. “I think we need to spend some time together. I have a book I think you’ll like. I’ll read it to you. I’ll be right back.”

Peter stands. He turns off the light as he runs up the stairs.

~~~

He loses track of time in the darkness when Peter finally returns from retrieving whatever book he had promised. Peter settles down next to him, yanks on his chin to make Hannibal look at him. Smiles kindly and smooths his hair down when Hannibal meets his eye.

"Have you read this before?" Peter asks. He holds the front cover up high enough for Hannibal to see it. A zeppelin and the title _Black Sunday_ are printed across the dark front. Hannibal shakes his head. Peter's smile widens. "It's really good. One of my favorites, in fact. I think you’ll really like it.”

Peter opens the book and starts reading out loud. His reading is muddled and bland. He tries to use different voices for different characters. It is instantaneously irritating. Hannibal loses interest immediately.

He thinks about Will. Frenzied, shaking. He isn’t sleeping; he swings between guilt-driven mania and catatonia. A raging animal running through barbed wire and across hot coals, single-mindedly driven to hunt the creature who stole its mate. Standing up to Jack, marking his dominance over the case that makes even the elder, hardened Alpha bend to his will.

“Are you okay, darling?” Peter asks. “You were making noises.”

“I’m fine,” Hannibal says. “Continue...”

Peter looks at him intently before returning to the novel. Will won’t let him live. This crude caricature of a criminal who ferreted him away, tied him to a wall and fitted urine-soaked rags to his face, all in the hopes of abusing his body for his own oppressive biological imperative. Hannibal would be very, very disappointed if he lived once this affair has ended.

“Are you sure you’re okay, darling?”

Hannibal shifts his hips. Peter’s eyes are drawn immediately to his wriggling bottom. “A little uncomfortable.”

Peter pouts. He lays his hand on Hannibal's head. "I promise, darling, you’ll be feeling a lot better soon.”

~~~

Peter resoaks the rags in urine and gags him again before he leaves the basement for the night. Hannibal gags the moment he feels the stale, warm liquid touch his lips. He pulls his head away, jerks it around until Peter loses his temper and kicks him in the temple. Dazed, he doesn’t fight again when a rag goes in his mouth, amber liquid spilling down his spasming gullet, around his nose, and around the entire bottom half of his face. Peter wishes him a sweet good night before turning off the lights and marching up the stairs.

He’s unsure how long he’s left in the darkness before he falls asleep. He doesn’t remember his dream that night, but when he wakes up, Will’s face is burned onto his corneas. The soft feel of his lips are warm against his dry, chapped, vile ones.

He lifts his head and feels how bloated his bladder is. He settles back down and sighs. It’s dark and quiet. The muscles in his arms tingle numbly. He moves his fingers and grits his teeth at the shooting pain.

He is dozing off when he hears the heavy tread of his captor moving across the ceiling. The door opens with a creak. Hannibal turns his face towards the noise. Peter is composed like an amateur’s attempt at a charcoal. Uneven lighting and poor angles. Pitifully ugly. He turns on the light and the picture doesn’t improve. He is carrying a plate of food and a glass of water.

“Good morning, darling. How did you sleep?”

He must not expect an answer. He is cloyingly pleasant until he kneels down and puts the glass and plate on the ground. His smile falls away as he sees the mauve bruise that has formed on Hannibal’s face. He touches it. A stinging pain shoots down through his jaw. He ducks his head away, hisses. 

“Oh...oh... Did I?” He touches the top of Hannibal’s head. “Was that...from me? From last night?” He doesn’t wait for affirmation. “Darling...I...I’m sorry I didn’t--” He lays a hand flat on Hannibal’s head. “I’ll be right back darling. I promise.” Peter runs up the stairs and scuffles about above him. He can hear the faint trickle of a faucet.

Peter returns, holding a bundle of dripping paper towels. He kneels down and presses the makeshift ice pack against his bruise. Hannibal flinches. Peter shushes him. “It’s okay, darling. It’s just water and ice. It’ll make you feel better.”

He tugs the gags down, but doesn’t fully remove them. Hannibal coughs at the fresh air. It is as pungent as the filtered air he had just been breathing. Peter rubs the top of his back, shushing him, believing he is calming.

“How are you feeling, darling?”

Hannibal spits. Lets his tongue relax. "How did you take me from my house?" he asks. His voice claws as it is dragged out. Peter’s forehead crinkles. “My boyfriend--”

“You don’t have a--”

“--was outside, in a car, waiting for me to come out. He would have entered the house the moment he suspected something.” Hannibal uses the cramped muscles in his upper back to lift his shoulders from the ground. “How did you get me out without him noticing?”

Peter blinks. “I drove away.”

Hannibal sighs. Lays his body back down. The hand on his back and the one holding the ice pack move as smoothly as he does. “It doesn’t matter. I will find out later. When you’re arrested.”

“I thought I told you before, darling,” Peter says with so much condescension that, if Hannibal were not tied like an animal, he would have cut out his tongue for it. “You don’t have a boyfriend. You have me. And the only place I’m going is work.” He smiles. “But that’s not for a while yet. Right now it’s time for you to eat.”

Hannibal turns his head away. The ice bundle drops to the floor with a wet plop.

“You need to eat, darling. You didn’t eat yesterday.”

He presses his face into the pillow.

There is agitated shuffling to his left. “You’re being stubborn. You need to eat.”

He doesn’t move.

After several moments of silence, Peter gives up. He adjusts the gags and leaves, taking the ice bundle and the food with him.

~~~

With no natural light, it is nearly impossible for him to guess how long he lay there before he pissed himself, or before he could hear the neighbor as they did laundry, or before he started feeling full of warm helium and light. 

The neighbor made the passage of time easier to track. He had already urinated on himself by the time he heard the soft, distant footfalls muted behind the thick concrete wall. The front of his slacks were wet, like he had spilled poorly microwaved tea, and clinging to his pelvis when he heard the machine start. He would guess an hour between the two events. When the first load switched from one machine to the next, he felt a nostalgic radiation from the soft center of his pelvis. It lifted up, raising his intestines and slipping between the pores of his lungs to fill them with something lighter and sweeter than air.

By the third load--he guesses that these machines, like most others, are preprogrammed to a standard fifty-five minutes per regular load, meaning that nearly two hours have passed by the time the third load starts tossing around--the neighbor has turned on a television. He can hear the gender and age, but cannot guess the words. Two women, older, professional: a morning talk show. It's late morning. A glaze of sweat has beaded on his forehead and under his clothing.

He recognizes that his breathing has changed, deepened, by the time the final load runs through the washer. He feels full. Not unpleasantly so. Not yet. But he knows the patterns of his body. He knows that at the end of the day he will be bloated with what the nuns called "vapors". What his aunt explained as the spirit of his child searching his body for the best of him, the parts his little child will want to take for itself. He knows that it's nothing more than his body synthesizing more liquid to replace the cups that will be lost in heat. Knowing what it is, though, doesn't make it any less uncomfortable.

He twists himself on his side, facing the wall, and is able to fall asleep like that. He wakes up to silence and the feeling of his uterus pressing against the rest of his guts. This, he decides, is worse than his first heat, which came suddenly as a snake or a blizzard. This, he fears, will be the death of him.

~~~

Thinking about Will, somehow, makes the bloated feeling worse, so he avoids remembering his flashes of smiles, the cottony feel of brown curls between his fingers. He focuses, instead, on remembering his recipes, the symptoms of schizophrenia, anything that would pass the slowing hours and distract him from the pressure within his body.

He is at the point of beating his head against the wall when he hears the slamming of the front door, the stomping across the ceiling. It comes almost as a blessing because while Peter is a sham of a creature, the most irritating of pests, he is _someone_. He is something to pass the time with. He comes down the stairs with food and water in hand and sneers at something.

"Hello, darling. Was there a leak down here?" he asks.

Hannibal stares at him as he makes his way over. He puts the food and water on the washer and kneels down to sniff.

"Oh, darling. Why didn't you tell me you needed to go last time I was here? I'll be right back." He returns several minutes later with a pail and a pair of scissors.

Peter kneels down next to and slightly behind him. Hannibal can barely see a sliver of him when he cranes his neck. "Now hold still, darling."

He hears the resistant pull of cloth against razor. He thrashes.

A hand lays on his lower back. “Calm down, darling. I need to take your clothes off.”

He grunts as he tries to shake the hand off of him. It curls into a fist and pulls on his suit jacket. “I said, calm down.”

Hannibal manages, in an uncoordinated feat of panic, to flop onto his side, back facing the wall. The scissors are knocked from Peter’s hand. They fall with a sharp metal _ting_ to the floor. He is flush with triumph and relief before blunt brown leather finds the softness in his ribs.

Peter kicks him fourteen times. Three times in the chest. Once in the chin. Nine times in the stomach. Once to the right of his groin. He kicks hard enough to move him flat against the wall. He leverages himself against the wall during the assault, allowing for harder and less focused kicks. Hannibal wants to vomit. His inflated intestines ripple in his tight cavaties. His temperature spikes. A warm liquid--maybe water, maybe blood--floods his mouth with the third kick to his chest. He worries he may have cracked some teeth. The clacking of his molars against each other resonates through his jaw, shakes his follicles in their pores. 

“I was trying to help you, you stupid bitch,” Peter mutters, slippery and choked. He leaves the basement.

Hannibal swallows. Saliva. He tries to regain control over his breath but his lungs push against his bruised ribs and shy away.

He curls into himself. Thinks of how he would crack open Peter's sternum and flay his ribs open like the soft pink mouth of a Venus fly trap if his rescue weren't so important.

~~~

Peter returns later that night, eyes inflamed from crying. He replaces Hannibal’s gags with fresh ones.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Peter says. “I was just trying to help you. It must be uncomfortable for you, lying in your own piss like that. I just wanted to help get you clean.”

Hannibal doesn’t say anything. He can’t once the gag is placed in his mouth.

“You should be thanking me,” Peter says. “I’m going to give you a chance to have a baby. One last chance before you can’t anymore.” He runs his hands up Hannibal’s back. Hannibal can’t stop himself from arching into the touch.

“You don’t want to age out of childbearing,” he says, stiff, thick fingers running down his spine. “Do you know what old, dried up Omegas smell like?” He leans down, thin mouth hovering uncomfortably close to the crest of Hannibal’s ear. “Stale,” he says. “Like bread that’s been left out for too long. So long you can’t even make croutons out of it.”

He takes a fistful of Hannibal’s hair. Jerks his head to make him look at him.

“You say you’ve got a boyfriend. He’s that young guy, right? The one I saw leaving your house the other morning? That’s the FBI agent who’s going to get you out of here, right? The one too busy sniffing your seat to stop me.” He leans down. “Those young ones will break your heart, darling. Once he starts smelling your age, he’ll tail it out of your bed. Once you start to dry up, he’ll find a younger version of you and you’ll be back to being some middle-aged cocktease in a queer bar. You’ll be the last one to leave and you’ll always go empty-handed.”

He lets go. Hannibal lets his head hang.

“I’m your last chance, darling. Your last opportunity.”

Hannibal shakes his head. Keeps his eyes closed and his eyebrows squeezed tightly together. Denial will give him a night’s peace.

“It’s been a while since you’ve eaten, darling. Would you like something to eat?”

Hannibal shakes his head again. A broad hand lays on the back of his head.

“You will soon.”

~~~

Peter returns the next morning, offering to take care of whatever wounds Hannibal received the night before. The wounds have undoubtedly swollen and blackened into bruises. His skin feels heavy in a way that he doesn’t associate with heat. His chest hurts. He hasn’t been able to feel his arms in half a day. Hannibal refuses to let Peter touch him. Peter does nothing but sigh and shake his head. “You’re one of those stubborn ones, aren’t you?” he asks. Hannibal can see a twitch of anticipation in his cheek.

He leaves without touching, feeding, or changing the gags. Hannibal is left to his own devices in the dark.

He dozes on and off for most of the day. The neighbor doesn’t do any laundry, so the only way he can keep track of time is through the changes of his body.

He starts the day sore from the beating and full from bloating. Lays very still to avoid the nausea that accompanies the sloshing of his excess. He wants to throw up. Wants to be at home, in his bed, cocooned in his sheets and drinking his aunt’s tea. The one she made for him when he was in school in Paris. He dreams of his little dorm room, the one he didn’t have to share, and of the Lady whose steady hands and glittering eyes inspired his first stirrings of emotion. She was graceful stoicism and peace personified as she lifted cups of cool soup and tea to his hot lips. Only smiled with fond nostalgia as he moaned into his pillow how much he wanted to get fucked. Massaged his back when the pain radiating from his pelvis had stiffened the muscles of his upper body, leaving him a drooling paralytic.

He can recognize the decompression of his bowels as he imagines Will supporting his upper back, bringing generations-old fine porcelain china to his open, gasping mouth. Encouraging him to pucker his lips, suck the jade-green liquid, and swallow. Encouraging him with lips that feel chill against his burning cheek. With nails that run from shoulder to shoulder. Explaining with airy, lisping words that his child--their child--has collected his best and is returning home to build itself, trait by trait, and all the nails and all the designing is going to hurt. This is normal.

“Why does it hurt so much for me?” he asks his aunt in the past and no one in his delusion.

“Because there is so much of you that it wants,” some phantom whisper responds.

By the time Peter returns, his stomping a distant echo, the mass of his water has decompressed and concentrated into a single dime-sized corpuscle of matter so tightly bound by its self-produced gravity it has begun to consume everything it has come into contact with in the past twenty-four hours. Even the neurons in his brain are being suctioned through the straw of his spine and being dragged down to that corner of his uterus. The gravity has hooked onto his stomach, his lungs, his esophagus. If he could feel his arms, he is certain they would hurt as well. When Peter comes downstairs, he is as tightly bound as his anticipating egg.

"Darling, are you okay?" Peter touches the side of Hannibal's face. If he were not bound and gagged, he would bite one of those foul fingers off.

"You’re warm,” Peter comments. A twitch of a smile disturbs his mouth. “Nearly there, aren’t you darling? Maybe another day?” He leans over Hannibal's huddled body. Sniffs at his neck, his shoulder, and his hip. Hums and runs his thumb down Hannibal's thigh. "You're cooking so fast, darling. I don't think you even need another day. Maybe I should come home early tomorrow, huh? You'd be all ready for me then, wouldn't you?"

He'd bite off his finger and shove the phalanges into his neck. Watch as he bled out before taking a big bite out of his arm. He'd be gaimy, normally Hannibal would have to treat him, but his trespasses call for a little extremity in the retribution. Something indelicate and animalistic, but so satisfying.

He refuses to eat again. He refuses to speak when Peter tries to start a conversation during gag changing. His captor ends up talking to him about his boring day--Hannibal barely has the patience for his own body and is quickly running out of patience with Will. The pitiful whelp he’s stuck with is burning the fumes of Hannibal’s good manners, surviving only because it is more advantageous for him to be alive and Hannibal in a submissive position. There is nothing redeeming about Peter and his staticky drone only proves it.

Hannibal finds it hard to fall asleep that night. Primarily because of the blossoming pain, rooting through his nervous system like mycelium, that makes it nearly impossible for him to grow comfortable enough to uncurl. His entire body is a stiff comma. To move is to risk disturbing the brightly burning knot deep inside of him.

Secondarily because, though he is only able to admit it in the darkness and solitude of his own mind, he is worried. Peter is right. His body is careening towards a heat, though the moment of its arrival is, as always, a mystery. It could be in the next hour. It could be tomorrow. It could be the day after. When he was fourteen, he once suffered a painful refractory period which lasted for a week, only to discover at the end that his heat had neglected to appear that month. If that is the case this time, if he is subject to the pain of his body and the pain of Peter’s anger, if the unknown variables that Will embodies prove to be against him, he just might lose this gamble. 

He avoids considering the price of his loss.

~~~

He is past pain when Peter checks on him the next morning. He is past numbness when his tired muscles surrender and relax on to the floor. He is past rationality when his addled, burning mind returns to the night he kissed Will.

He can’t remember the last time he was kissed like that. With a tender licking flame of affection and the uncharacteristic assuredness that fits Will so well. A blissed gaze when they separated, and what Hannibal wouldn’t do to have Will’s mouth against his instead of this damned gag. To have those salt-worn hands running down his neck again.

(Some distant, dark edge of him is screaming that he stay strong, to ignore this floating sensation, the ache of his emptiness. The more he desires it, the stronger it will become. That's nonsense. His arousal is a predetermined fact of his biology: a child born to pride, who thrives in lust and greed. It is in his blood and no amount of tuning in or tuning out will change that.)

What would those hands feel like on his chest? Rough and dry with the remains of night terrors left in the canals of his palms? Would they be as deft across his pectorals as they were on his neck? What about across his stomach or down his thighs?

(Time is running at two speeds: dizzyingly fast and deliciously slow. The world is passing him by in leaps and bounds. Beyond the walls that block his vision, the sun plummets under the border of dusty-charcoal rowhome roofs. In his mind, time has tapered to the sensual reconstruction of the possibilities of his encounter with Will. In that warped space, a second is an hour, and the inching of a hand is the tipping of the sun.)

 _I want you naked._ That’s what he said, hovering close, dominance emanating in curls, warning off rogue competitors. Playing aphrodisiac in Hannibal’s lungs. He’s not encountered a more effective drug in his nearly fifty years. If Will had demanded it, Hannibal would have stripped out of his clothes for him, slow, precise, letting Will witness the shifting of the muscles in his back as he pulled his arms back to let his suit jacket slip away, revealing the broad triangle of his torso, the strength of his arms, the lean muscle of his slim legs. Prove what a good mate he is by lowering himself to his knees and laying his head on Will’s lap, mouth at the fly of those awful jeans.

(He hears, but does not acknowledge the familiar stomping of boots on weak wood floor. Feels, but does not notice, the dust flung from the rafters above him. And if there were any waft of Alpha, any sense of danger or wrongness associated with this particular scent, this particular suitor, it is blockaded by the pungency of old urine.)

He would want to be taken on his back. It was easier, in that position, to gage the emotions flitting across his partner’s face. Easier to protect and defend himself. He would want to be bent in half, caged between Will's arms, his heels guiding deeper and harder. But if Will wanted it, he would be happy to clamor onto his lap and ride him. Or bend over his desk. Does his avoidance of eye contact extend to intimacy? Or would he--

There is a quick succession of gunshots and then a heavy thump. Hannibal is unceremoniously removed from his fantasy, returned to the dark basement. He holds his breath as he listens to a set of footsteps, lighter and quicker than the ones he's accustomed to, scuffle around the first floor. A blade of yellow light grows on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The elongated shadow is bent at the shoulders.

“Hannibal?”

With those three syllables, he finds himself tumbling into his arousal. He groans, deep and loud, as his first wave of wet soaks into his ruined pants.

The stairs sway and creak as Will runs down the stairs. The lights come on. Hannibal tightly shuts his eyes.

“Hannibal!”

He moans Will’s name, but it comes formlessly out of his mouth. He hears four long strides as Will crosses the tiny room. Hannibal opens his eyes enough to see Will’s bent knees. A warm, calloused hand cups his face, palm lying directly on top of the bruise on his jaw, hidden by the gags.

Hannibal squirms. Archs his face into Will’s hand. Moans again. Will unties the gags. He coughs when he feels the cloying fabric unstick itself from his tongue. A wave of fresh air and Alpha and Will nauseates him. His coughing dissipates into choking. Fingertips softly brush against the swollen skin of his jaw and chin. He controls his spasming throat enough to grind out, “Will.”

Will is tersely silent for a moment. “Do you think you can kneel?” he asks. Hannibal nods. “Do you need help, or--?” Hannibal nods again, swallowing nothing. Two hands grasp his shoulders and hefts his limp, weighty body onto his knees. Fingers return to his bruises, testing with light, painless presses.

“I’m--” Will starts. Stops. Swallows and tries again, “I’m--”, before giving up.

“I knew...” Hannibal mutters. “I knew... My Will...” He leans into Will’s body, nose pressing into the crook of Will’s neck. He feels a new wave of warmth and familiarity, desire and need, flush through the lower half of his body. Will tenses during the flush. “My Will.”

Arms encircle his shoulders. A hand finds the back of his head. “Your Will.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everyone who first read this on the meme and who gave such lovely feedback over there. I want to thank everyone who followed it over to AO3 and everyone who found it here. Everyone who gave kudos and feedback, you are amazing. I love you all, even if I can't speak to each and every one of you directly. You are all fabulous and you make this hobby more fun and rewarding. :)

The ambulance arrives while Will is sawing through Hannibal's bindings. He can hear the paramedics cleave together before Will calls up for assistance. A young man peeks beneath the ceiling half-wall. "We've got a hot one down here," he says before disappearing. A new paramedic, a woman Beta, runs downstairs and jogs over to Will and Hannibal.

"Hey," she says, kneeling in front of Hannibal. She glances behind him, to Will. "Are you the cop who called?" Will doesn't answer, but her simple nod must mean he responded.

She gently guides his head around, touching and pressing his bruises. "Does it hurt when I do this?" Hannibal can't feel much of anything, except arousal and the burn left by Will's hands on his skin. He shakes his head. "How long have you been in heat?"

"Several hours," Hannibal says. "There's not been any intercourse," he adds. Will, behind him, sawing away at the last of his bindings, makes a pleased noise.

"Any other injuries?"

"Perhaps, with my ribs."

The paramedic touches his torso, around his rib cage. "Sir, you need to take off these clothes for me."

He hears something behind him. It could be the drag of ropes coming undone. It could be a growl. The thought of the latter makes him wetter.

"Not here..."

She nods. "We'll take you to the ambulance. Can you stand on your own?"

With the lashings to his legs cut, he is pretty certain he can. He shakes his head. "I don't know..."

Will's hand feels like a hot towel on the back of his neck. He sighs. "I'll help you." He squats to Hannibal's right and maneuvers his arm around Will's shoulders. The paramedic moves to take Hannibal's left arm, but halts when Will growls.

"Sir, he needs more than one person to help him right now."

"The stairs aren't wide enough for three people to go up them," is Will's decent but threatening argument. The paramedic holds her hands up and steps back. Will easily hefts Hannibal onto purposefully shaking feet. The paramedic follows closely behind them.

They pass a mound in a white sheet on their way out. There are large red stains concentrated in the chest area. Hannibal whimpers. Will squeezes the hand that hangs near his elbow.

Hannibal doesn’t recognize the neighborhood. It’s lower-end, perhaps in the south east. Three-quarters of the houses are formstone and several of them are emptied, decorated plywood and fake interiors in the windows. Clusters of neighbors have come out to gawk with round, apathetic eyes. Will leads him to the open back of the ambulance. The male paramedic, who he can now scent as another Beta, holds out a hand for Hannibal to take. He shudders away from Will’s glare.

“Several large subcutaneous hematomas on the face and neck,” the female paramedic says. “Patient is in estrus and cannot feel pain. Reports damage to his chest but can’t assess the severity of it.”

“Perfect,” the male paramedic says with an eyeroll. He gestures to the gurney. “Are we taking him to Harbor?”

“We’re gonna check him in here first before we take him anywhere,” she says as she steps into the ambulance. Will helps him to sit. He grimaces as he feels the pressure of the weight of his entire body settle on his backside. It’s probably the closest to pain he’ll feel in this part of his heat. He lays his head against the metal wall and sighs. Reaches out and holds Will’s hand. “There’s no reason to haul him to an ER if there’s nothing worse than bruising. Sir,” the female paramedic says to Will. “There’s not enough room in this van for all of us. You’re going to have to get out.”

He squeezes Will’s hand. Will won’t look away from him. Cop cars pull up outside the house, lights spinning but sirens off. “No.”

“Sir--”

“He’s my partner.”

“And if his ribs are broken and we don’t find that out now, he will be in a lot of pain later. Or worse,” she says.

Will swallows and steps away. They have to release their hands. Hannibal whimpers from the loss. The ghostly remnant of Will’s skin on his crawls up his arm.

“Sir, you need to take off your jacket and shirt so we can examine your chest.”

Hannibal nods. Aware of Will’s eyes on him, he performs what must be the least arousing strip tease he could concoct. He keeps his swollen, tender chest stiff as he takes off his suit jacket, torn a little in the back, his tie, waist coat, and then his dress shirt. He hears and smells Jack's arrival as he is slipping off his shirt.

“Will, we need to talk,” Jack says.

“Lift your arms as high as you are comfortable,” the paramedic says. He lifts them to just below his shoulders.

“Do we have to talk right now?” Will asks, harsh. Perhaps because of Jack, perhaps from the impotency he feels seeing Hannibal’s damaged body.

The paramedic presses a hand to his side. She asks if he feels anything. He tells her it’s tender, but there’s no pain. She presses harder and he feels something, some noncommittal sensation in his spine, but still no pain. Her fingers, long and cool and pointed, massage the parts of the bruise that cover his ribs.

“We do,” Jack says. “It’s important.”

“Can you feel anything?” the male paramedic asks. She shakes her head.

“Some things are more important,” Will says.

She presses hard, harder than she ever has before. The sensation in his spine spikes to his brainstem He gasps, more out of shock than pain. In his periphery, Will jerk forward.

“We need to take him to the hospital,” she says. “He needs an X-Ray.”

“Will?” Hannibal says softly. He looks to his left, where Will is standing with his hands pressed against the side of the van.

“You’re staying here,” Jack quickly tells Will.

“Will.” Hannibal says panickedly. Will’s pupils grow as he continues to stare. The male paramedic jumps out of the back of the vehicle.

“Are you in or out?” the female paramedic asks. She is guiding a resistant Hannibal into a prone position.

Will glances at her. Looks behind him. Sees a highly disapproving Jack. “I can’t,” he says. He steps into the back of the ambulance.

“Will!”

Will turns around and holds a hand up. “You don’t need me here, you just want to talk to me about what happened in the house. Hannibal needs me.” He sits by Hannibal’s head. Reaches out and touches his face as the female paramedic closes the doors. Hannibal sighs and offers more of his face and neck.

~~~

It’s hard to be separated from Will at the hospital. He is from the moment they enter the Emergency Room. This sweaty nervousness he feels must be akin to an addict in withdrawal. When they’re apart, he thinks of what Will is doing. Is he sitting in the waiting room? Or pacing? Scaring away the other worried, edgy Alphas you always find in these places? Did Jack hunt them down and corner Will? Is he defending himself, his actions, his second murder?

He groans as he thinks about it. Will killed someone for him. His fingers ball into fists. Will shot a man three times in the chest for him. He’s always found himself more attracted to, more desirous of Will’s darker sides. The poeticism of his demons. The intelligence he can see in his shadows. There is a potential there for partnership, honesty. He might lose the lunar glow of his fear, the electricity of his panic, but the wealth of his gain will compensate what he would lose.

He is squirming on his poorly padly gurney when he asks the nurse about Will. Can he see him? He wants him. Please, please, he wants his Will. The nurse takes pity and fetches Will, who enters the room with wide eyes and a pale face. She asks them to not have sex in the hospital room, and then leaves.

“Will...”

Will is at Hannibal’s side in seconds. His hands find his face and shoulder. Fingertips run in circles and diamonds on the unharmed side of his chest and stomach. Hannibal smiles and nuzzles the hand on his face.

“Have you heard anything?” he asks.

Hannibal shakes his head. “I’ve gotten an X-Ray but the doctor hasn’t come back. We should find out soon.”

Will's thumb smooths Hannibal's eyebrow. "I should've gone with you." Hannibal shakes his head. "I could've prevented this--"

Hannibal places a hand over Will's. "You cannot torture yourself with this guilt. There are a hundred things that you or I could have done to prevent this. It does not change what has happened." He moves Will's hand down, palm and fingers spread across his neck. He arches his neck into the palm. He sighs as he says, "Some would insist that this impossible series of coincidences happened for a reason."

"Do you believe in fate now?" The thick padding of skin over Will's climbs the lump of his Adam's apple.

"I believe that we were meant to be together. That there is something larger than us pulling us together. Be it God, luck, or our own unconscious processes."

Will looks stricken. Hannibal wonders what he is thinking about: an immediate fulfillment or a long-term prize. He runs a hand up Will's arm.

"Your neck is really sensitive."

Hannibal nods.

"What else? What else do you like touched?"

He takes a deep breath. He feels light; as if he isn't breathing a cocktail of gases, but luminescence itself. "My back."

Will leans over him, depositing an atmosphere as thick and hot as Venus on top of him. "So," he whispers, "if I dragged my nails down your back..."

A polite cough echoes from the door. Will pulls away from Hannibal like he's been scalded. Hannibal growls high in his chest. "If the lovebirds are done I have the scan of Dr. Lecter's rib cage." The doctor approaches, holding up a black sheet of film. He clips the film to a lightboard, turns it on. "You are a very lucky man, doctor," he says, pointing to the ghastly lines of bone. "You escaped with severe bruising, but no broken bones."

"Is there anything we can do for it?" Will asks.

"There's not much," the doctor says, turning to face Will. "Dr. Lecter will need bed rest, Ibuprofen, and cold compacts. He's going to be in a lot of pain once his heat breaks. If you two are going to speed that along, I would suggest positions and speeds that don't jostle his chest." The doctor taps the picture. "Once we get a script written for him, you're free to go."

The doctor leaves. Will digs his fingers in Hannibal's hair. He reaches up and touches Will's wrist.

"How are we leaving the hospital?" he asks.

Will touches the bridge of his nose. "Jack is...here and willing to take us to your place. If we want him to."

Hannibal arches his neck as far back as he can comfortably manage. Will is touching the uninjured half of his face, staring mournfully at the corner.

"I saw what you did," Hannibal says. Will swallows. "I don't blame you. What he was doing, what he wanted to do, he d--."

"Don't," Will demands. Hannibal feels his words stop in his chest, right under his heart. "Don't you dare say..."

Hannibal notes the tense line of his jaw. The subtle threat of nails on his jaw. He quickly rethinks his words. "Do you think he didn't?"

Will spends a long, quiet minute mulling the question, stroking Hannibal's face. His fingers delicately trace the circles of Will's knuckles.

"He said," Will starts hesitantly, "you'd kept crying out for another man. He was only there to get rid of the body." He shudders as he breaths. “It was so easy. And I can’t bring myself to care.”

“But you still feel shame?” Hannibal asks. “Not for your actions, but for your reaction.” He tips his head into Will’s hand. “Is this Garrett Jacob Hobbs again?”

Will shakes his head. Coughs a chuckle. “No. No. This is nowhere near...that. I’m secure in my mind, Hannibal. I’m not becoming _him_.” Will runs his hands down Hannibal’s neck. “I always thought Omegas were writhing messes when they were in heat.”

“I try to be as contrarian as possibility,” Hannibal says. He licks his lips. “If you want me to be an aroused mess, you should wait another day or so. You’ll know when I’m ready when I forget how to speak English.”

Will laughs. He presses his thumbs into the sides of Hannibal’s neck. “Do you normally forget English during sex?”

“If my partner can make me,” Hannibal responds playfully.

Will laughs and bends down. They kiss, moist and red. Will hums when they part. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”

~~~

When a nurse comes to the room with Hannibal’s perscription, they are kissing gently. Hannibal’s head pillowed by Will’s arm. Will’s shoulders loosely captured by Hannibal’s arms. They don’t know about the nurse until she clears her throat. Even then, the amorous atmosphere they have generated makes it difficult for them to separate. The nurse has to put her hand on Will’s shoulder and tug him back a couple steps to get to the bed. She instructs Hannibal to sit up, which he does with a low groan and what he can only describe as a “squishy” feeling in his boxers. She instructs him on dosages and schedules and what he can and can't drink. He nods along, though at the moment all he wants to do is leave this woman to rot and have Will take him on the gurney. When she’s finished, she tells him to get off. When he steps off, his knees dissolve into cottony static and he falls.

Will catches him on his right. The nurse holds his left bicep.

“This happens during heat,” he explains plainly.

“Can you hold yourself up at all?” the nurse asks.

“Do you need me to carry you?” Will asks.

“I prefer a wheelchair,” he says. The nurse helps ease him onto the floor before leaving to find a wheelchair.

Will touches the exposed summit of Hannibal’s left clavicle. “Are you sure you don’t want me to carry you?”

“Are you going to carry me like a virgin over the threshold?” Hannibal asks. “Or are you going to sling me over your shoulder or your back, like a hoarder?” He shakes his head. “I’m too heavy for you.”

“You’re not,” Will insists.

“Then pick me up and carry me all of the way to my home.” Will smiles and lays his head against Hannibal’s.

The nurse appears half a minute after she left. The three of them together, Hannibal holding the arms of the chair, the nurse at his feet, and Will’s long-fingered hands hooked under his armpits, are able to put Hannibal in the wheelchair. He shivers when he is fully seated. The nurse pushes him out, Will fidgeting by her side.

Jack is sitting in the waiting room. He raises his eyebrows at Hannibal. Hannibal wants to rip them off of his head.

“Who am I taking where?” Jack asks with the patience of the self-aware parent in a teen sex comedy.

“To Hannibal’s,” Will says. He takes control of the chair from the nurse and pushes forward. “But we’re going to need to make a stop at a pharmacy first.”

Jack doesn’t say anything until they have reached his car. He offers to help Will get Hannibal into the back of his car. Will responds with a cold and edgy, “No”, and is able to move Hannibal into the car with little assistance. When Will is about to climb in next to him, Jack stops him with a firm hand on his back.

“You’re sitting up front,” he says.

Will hisses, flares out like an angry cat, “Why?”

“I don’t want my car to smell like mating season,” Jack says. “It’s going to be difficult explaining the smell as is.”

Will’s hand is on Hannibal’s shin. His eyes are fluttering from jaw to chest to soft, large hands, before gritting his teeth and following Jack’s orders. He mutters something callous, something about Jack not liking the smell. Hannibal doesn’t hear the rest since Jack closes the door. With no one else in the back with him and his ass growing more and more tender, Hannibal lies down.

They stop at a Rite-Aid just beyond 95, in a southwestern corner of Federal Hill. Will promises to be quick and jumps out. Jack waits until Will has shut the door and walked around the car before pouncing.

“I thought,” he says, slashed eyes looking at him through the rearview mirror, “you weren’t the kind of doctor who engaged in indecent behavior.”

Hannibal closes his eyes. “I said I would never deny Will his nature. It is instinctual for him to want to express care through protection. To court through expressions of his strength and prowess.”

“This is the twenty-first century,” Jack says. “And you’re his therapist. You, of all people, should know better.”

Hannibal lifts his head slightly. “Than to do what?”

Jack gestures with an angry flap of hand. “To lead him on like this.”

Hannibal lays his head back down. “I have not been dishonest with him,” he says. “This is the unexpected setting of our inevitable affair.”

Their discussion dies. Will returns a few minutes later with a plastic bag filled with no less than five boxes of condoms. Jack drives up Hanover, onto Charles, the straightest if not the shortest path Hannibal’s home just northwest of the City. Will’s hand hangs behind his chair, open and calling out. Hannibal fills it and smiles softly for the next twenty-five minutes.

His knees are stronger when they get to his house but he is still incapable of holding his own weight. Will doesn't mind. He slings Hannibal’s arm over his shoulders and carefully marches him up the drive and in to the large marble and stone house. Will is careful that his white plastic bag doesn’t bump against Hannibal’s side as they tediously make their way up the grand, staircase. When Hannibal had first bought this house, he had thought this an imposing and grand feature. Dark chestnut intricately carved with ivy leaves and vines. It has served its purpose as a conversation piece for new and old visitors and has become a fond item, an item of pride. Now, though, he curses the thing for existing between his entrance and his bed.

“I want you to knot me,” he says. Will chokes. “I want to know what it feels like.”

“I didn’t buy those condoms,” Will says.

“Please,” he begs. He presses the side of his face into Will’s. “Will.”

They are at the top of staircase. Hannibal guides them left, and they start down the hall. The proximity to his bedroom, his proximity to Will, or some very poor timing, triggers a third tide of wetness. He lowers himself to the ground, moaning, pulling Will down on top of him. “Please,” he repeats. “Here.”

He pulls Will’s mouth to his as Will is shaking his head. “No,” he breaths after the kiss. Hannibal can feel his erection pressing against the groove of his pelvis. “Your bed is going to be more comfortable.” Hannibal’s fingers scrabble against Will’s shirt. Will pulls away, stands up, and cradles Hannibal’s shoulders as he pulls him up.

They are six feet away from his bedroom door, but it feels like a thousand. He’s certain he’s dilating. If he were capable of feeling pain right now, he’s sure every step would be a physical agony. It’s already agonizing--his buoyancy is turning against him, traipsing quickly from pleasant high to nauseous bloat. He holds his breath and tries to match his footsteps to Will’s. He will make it to the bedroom, he promises himself. He will have his Will.

They make it to the bedroom, and Hannibal’s knees start to shake again. They make it to his king-sized bed, and his body is loose. He lays down on his back, adjusts the arrangement of his body to give Will enough room to climb on top. But he doesn't. Instead, he runs wide, possessive hands up and down his shins, fingers adjusting to fit the width of his lower legs.

"These things are dangerous," Will says. "Every part of you..." He takes off Hannibal’s shoes and socks, thumbs running around the perimeter of his ankles. “There’s so much I want to do with you.”

His face is flush. Some halting, undignified noise comes out of his mouth. His thighs open at the hint of Will’s fingers at his knee.

Will steps away from the bed to hurriedly undress himself. There is little precision in Will’s undressing, and there are several fumbles, but his eyes never leave Hannibal’s. The blackness in them, the sensitive pupils blown wide, focuses and transfers the heat and weight of his arousal, his need to mark. Hannibal feels like he’s drowning.

Will straddles his thighs. His body is average. It’s a straight line, chest to hips, with a soft excess of stomach that is more charming than distracting. He’s hairy as well. Thickets of downy fur, short hairs and curls across his chest, arms, and collected around the base of his red, uncut dick. His arms and shoulders have most of his muscle mass: coarse, tight ropings, hard, powerful from use. He salivates as he runs his hands over biceps and deltoids. His hands curl underneath Will’s armpits when he leans down to kiss him. It’s sloppy. Hannibal’s mouth is still wet and their lips aren’t syncing. Hannibal is eager. Will is precise. He can feel Will’s erection on his stomach. He reaches between them to stroke it, feel the popping veins beneath the foreskin, test the elasticity of the knot. Thinks, as Will is curling into his hand, that it should be inside of him.

Will breaks the kiss. Whispers, “I’m going to take your clothes off.”

Hannibal nods. He is still fully clothed in the crusted, stained three-piece he had been held captive in. He’s disgusted by it, may not even attempt to salvage it, and certainly doesn’t care when Will is careless with the way he tosses the items over his shoulder. Will only hesitates in his stripping when he reaches the black boxer briefs and, from the dazed expression, Hannibal assumes it relates to a sense of finality: the end of the race. He lifts his hips as Will slides the underwear off.

When they kiss this time, it is with mutual ferocity. They lick and taste as Will bucks into Hannibal’s hips. Hannibal’s legs spread, lift, and cage Will’s moving lower half, Will’s nails drag down Hannibal’s sides, and Hannibal’s hands search for a respite on Will’s back, shoulders, hair.

Will breaks the kiss. Pants, “Condoms”, and starts to lean over the side of the bed. Hannibal uses his crossed legs to pull him back.

“Bareback,” he argues.

Will rests a hand on Hannibal’s stomach. “You said you didn’t--”

“Please.”

The hand on his stomach runs in circles. “I could be so good,” Will says. “I can be so much better. I'm-I'm getting better, with you.”

Hannibal nods. He rocks his weight backwards so that he is lying flat on his back. With his ankles locked behind Will’s rump, he guides him forward, to the warm nest of his lap. Will reaches down and pushes one, and immediately two, fingers into Hannibal’s hollow, wet opening.

“Now. Now, please,” Hannibal says.

Will nods enthusiastically. “Yes. Yes,” he says, breathy and eager. He lines the head of his cock with Hannibal’s asshole. Pushes. And, like they were built for each other, curves seamlessly into Hannibal's swollen vagina.

Hannibal groans deeply. Curls his nails into Will's shoulders. Will breathes his name like a prayer. Adjusts Hannibal’s hips, lifts them up so that he could be fully seated, and starts pumping his hips.

Will's thrusts start shallow, slow. The testing toe in the summer pool. The head of his cock just brushes against the summit of Hannibal's cervix and the loose, malleable skin at the base of his cock barely leaves the rectum. Hannibal makes a needy whine and forces his ankles into the crease of Will's back. Will responds with a sharp thrust, one that pushes against his G-spot and bounces off of his inner mound. Hannibal shudders and arches his entire body off of the mattress.

"How easily do you come?" Will asks. He adjusts his arms so that his right arm supports Hannibal and his left arm supports himself. He makes another pointed, quick thrust. Hannibal whines. "Can I fuck you like this? Could you come from just my dick?" Hannibal nods. "What about my knot? Could I make you come with that?" Will thrusts hard and grinds down into him. Hannibal cries out, shuts his eyes, and grinds back. 

Will grabs his chin and Hannibal opens his mouth, intending to bite. "Keep your eyes open," Will hisses. A strategic thrust of hips makes Hannibal gasp and open his eyes. Will's thumb runs over the part of his lips.

"You're so beautiful like this," Will says. He thrusts. "So beautiful." He leans down and Hannibal meets him for a kiss.

They keep a quick, pounding rhythm, paced with refractory periods of deep, slow grinding. Will is the perfect length and girth for him, and the stretch and burn of his slowly growing knot stays on the right side of comfortable. Will proves to be a very vocal partner. Between little puffs of breath and aborted curses, he switches between soft whispers of adoration--You're amazing, beautiful, incredible, perfect--and harsh proclamations of his ownership--You're mine, mine, mine, and no one is going to take you away from me. His empathy is at its most impressive display. He is able to find the strings of Hannibal's body and play him with the adroit fingers of a maestro to two orgasms. 

The first involves his whole body. Will's fingers splay and press into the nodes of Hannibal's vertebrae, tapping the rhythm of a tune he had learned in some primordial, backwater bayou. Nails glancing the edge of the black bruise inexpertly painted on his side. Teeth and tongue tasting the corner of his jaw, the red, salted skin of his neck. The suck on his neck, the press of fingertips, and the slide of cock inside of him executed with such intricately timed precision that each of the separate nerve bundles went off at the same time, met at the same moment, and set off a quick-burning fuse in his disparate edges. As the diamondiferous sparks race towards his core, burning the light and the gas, the excess he had been carrying for days, he curls around Will, cocooning him, pulling him close, and letting loose a high, loud keen.

Will stops inside of him. “Fuh--,” he whispers. He’s getting closer. The pull of his knot is becoming harder, less pleasurable. “Hannibal.”

His second orgasm blooms warmly from where he and Will are connected, catching on the ashen remains of his first one. It rolls through him like a warm saltwater wave, bright in the early morning. He gently bites Will’s tough shoulder. Sucks softly on the thin skin

“I’m so close, Hannibal, please, let me--”

“Pull out,” he says. Will whimpers. Presses his face against Hannibal’s as he pulls himself out with a lewd pop.

Careful not to disturb his bruises, Hannibal rolls onto his front, supporting his weight on his arms and knees. His veins, the ruins of age-atrophied muscles, push against his skin. He looks over his shoulder, at Will. Nods. Whispers, “Go.”

Will sighs. He kisses Hannibal’s shoulder as he pushes in. Smiles against his sweaty back and ruts, hard and desperate, until he comes just a handful of seconds later. Hannibal cringes, grits his teeth, bends his head at the feeling of Will’s swollen knot plugging him. It doesn’t hurt--nothing hurts--but it is distractingly uncomfortable to what is otherwise a wonderful sensation. Will’s cock fits snugly inside of him, twitching as it ejaculates. He feels the pulsing, a double beat like a heartbeat. Will’s heartbeat. Hannibal hums as he squeezes the muscles in his rear. He hears Will choke and feels another twitch, another pump of ejaculate.

“You’re going to kill me,” Will whispers. Hannibal chuckles as Will kisses his neck.

"I was planning on eating you alive," he retorts. Not his wittiest, but Will still laughs. Is still rocking shallowly into him. "Let's lie down," he suggests. Will nods. Licks at the crux of his neck. They are careful not to pull on the knot as they lie down on their sides. Will wraps his arms around Hannibal’s middle. Presses his face against Hannibal’s scapula.

“You're so warm” Will says. He presses closely. Shivers. Hannibal feels the knot swell again.

He sighs. "Can that thing get any bigger?"

Will smiles. "Do you want it to?" He rubs Hannibal's stomach. Hannibal reaches back, digs his hand into that soft, brown hair.

"I can't provide much," Will says. "I don't have money or houses but I can give so much. I can... I can _do_ so much."

"Go to sleep, my darling," Hannibal says, gripping Will's curls tightly. Will shivers and comes again.

He nods. Hannibal closes his eyes. Falls asleep with the comforting echo of two heartbeats inside of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since this is something a few commenters have asked about, I decided to make an End Note about it.
> 
> There is no epilogue. This fic is this fic. I do, however, have a few ideas for a sequel, but I am in school and I do want to focus on other projects, RL and fanfic related. I might, one day, make this a series. I can't say when and I won't make promises beyond "this is a thing that I am thinking about." No guarantees. No promises.


End file.
